(Geneva) British athlete Mo Farah, four-time Olympic champion and victim of human traffickers as a child in Somalia, on Tuesday became a goodwill ambassador for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN agency.
Double gold medalist over 5,000m and 10,000m at the London Games in 2012 and Rio in 2016, Mo Farah retired from sport in September, at the age of 40.
“Becoming an IOM Goodwill Ambassador gives me the chance to help people, people like me, to make a difference,” he said.
The athlete revealed in 2022 that he had not arrived with his parents in Great Britain with refugee status, as his biography had previously indicated, but that he had been the victim of child traffickers .
Mo Farah, whose real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin, arrived in London via Djibouti at the age of eight or nine, accompanied by a woman he had never seen before and under a false identity. He was then placed in the service of a family.
“No child should have to go through what I went through. The victims of child trafficking are just children, who deserve to be children, who deserve to play,” he continued on Tuesday.
The British athletics star said he wanted to use his new position to promote the power of sport as a means of empowerment, particularly for women and girls.
“I was able to take the opportunity that sport offered me to go beyond the experience I had as a child and to demonstrate that, regardless of our appearance or our accent, we can achieve great things,” said Mo Farah.
