The PE teacher who Sir claims saved him from slavery and secured his British citizenship today described the ‘bombshell’ of learning the truth and insisted the athlete insisted he had ‘no other option’ but to reveal he had been living a lie.
Britain’s greatest long distance runner, 39, has said he was brought to the UK illegally when he was around eight or nine using another child’s identity and spent his early years in domestic servitude for a woman he had never met before.
In the documentary, The Real Mo Farah, the father-of-four apologised for lying about his identity and the deception in his 2013 autobiography, which will need to be updated.He was given British citizenship in 2000, given a CBE in 2013 and then knighted by in 2017 under his false name. Sir Mo’s real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin.
He has credited his PE teacher Alan Watkinson with ‘saving him’ and also helped Mo obtain British citizenship and follow his sporting dreams. Sir Mo and his teacher formed a close bond over many years, which even resulted in Mr Watkinson being the best man at his wedding in 2010
Speaking today, he said that the Olympic hero was determined to tell the truth having had ‘no other option’ but to ‘lock away’ his past during his rise to greatness.
He told Good Morning Britain of the moment Mo told him he wanted to tell the world: ‘It was an interesting moment because I know that a lot of his friends were saying to him, “Are you sure? Do you really want to do this? Can’t you just leave it alone? This could cause you all sorts of problems”.’
He added: ‘I know Mo, when he decides he wants to do something, he more often than not goes ahead and does it.And more often than not his instinct is right’. GMB host Ranvir Singh asked Alan if he advised Mo against doing it and he said: ‘No, I didn’t. I talked to him and listened to him, I knew from what he said to me that he had to do it.’
Ben Shephard then asked if it was difficult seeing Mo telling a history that wasn’t true, and Alan said: ‘Really difficult, but he was in that situation where, really, he had no other option. The progress he was making as an athlete, the knowledge that if this story came out at any particular time, what would that mean for him?He, I believe, locked that away because he wanted to focus on the thing that drove him.’
And on whether Mo welcomes the criminal investigation of him being trafficked, Alan said: ‘I don’t think he wishes ill of anybody, that wasn’t his aim.He didn’t go into it seeking retribution or anything like that, he went in for his own benefit and to also expose what other people are going through’.
It came as relatives back home in Somalia feared he had been sold into slavery and could even have been dead – only for fear to turn to joy by seeing him conquer the world of athletics with four golds at two Olympics.
His cousin, Harun Aden, told the Times: ‘We thought he had been sold, that we had lost our boy.It seems to be that what happened to him was his luck. We became his fans who followed his success in the world and at the Olympics with all our pride. He has made us all very famous. So it was a very bad story that became like a dream.’
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