adminPiers Morgan in LONDON
SEVEN years ago, Mo Farah looked me straight in the eye in front of millions of people – and lied through his back teeth.
We were sitting just a few feet away from each other in a London TV studio, recording a lengthy interview for my show Life Stories.
And during an emotion-charged encounter, Mo – now Sir Mo – talked very movingly about coming to Britain from war-torn Somalia with his mother and several siblings to be reunited with his father Muktar who was already here working as an IT consultant in London.
There was only one problem with this touching reunion tale: it was all untrue.
Mo’s father, whose real name was Abdi, had died four years before in Somalia’s civil war.
And his now world-famous son, the first British track and field athlete to win four Olympic gold medals, has sensationally revealed that he was in fact illegally trafficked to the UK under a false name, and made to work as a domestic servant from the age of just nine.
“Most people know me as Mo Farah, but it’s not my name, or it’s not the reality,” he told a BBC documentary that airs tomorrow night.
“The real story is I was born in Somaliland, north of Somalia, as Hussein Abdi Kahin. Despite what I’ve said in the past, my parents never lived in the UK. When I was four, my dad was killed in the civil war. I feel like I’ve always had that private thing where I could never be me and tell what’s really happened.”
Mo’s appalling ordeal only ended when he finally told his school PE teacher who contacted social services and helped him be fostered by another Somali family.
From that moment, his life took a dramatic turn for the better and a relieved, liberated and much happier Mo never looked back as he ran himself into Olympic legend.
Now, finally, he feels able to reveal the truth about what happened to him.
To say I was gob-smacked by his bombshell confession is the understatement of the Millennium.
In preparation for all my Life Stories interviews, I would spend days immersing myself into the deepest recesses of the subject’s life.
By the time I sat down with Mo in May 2015, I had carefully studied every significant media interview he’d ever given, and read his 2013 autobiography, Twin Ambitions.
It’s no exaggeration to say that, as with many of the guests, I probably knew more about him than he would be able to remember about himself.
Yet it turned out I didn’t know the half of it, and Mo’s real life story was far more shocking and extraordinary than I could ever have imagined. No wonder his first words to me when the cameras rolled were: “I’m really nervous because I’ve never talked about my life…”
Thinking back to that show again today, it’s strange and uncomfortable to remember Mo tell me about being reunited with his father in London, and about his difficult relationship with him after that, knowing what I know now.
Some interviewers might feel cheated or angry a guest lied to them so spectacularly on prime-time TV. But I don’t. – The Sun
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