Mo Farah
Trafficked into Britain as a child, he became the greatest distance runner the country has produced
For most of his career the world knew the story of Mo Farah as a boy who came to London from Somalia at eight to join his father. In 2022 he revealed the truth. His real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin. His father was killed in the civil war in Somaliland when he was four, and at about nine he was flown to Britain by a woman he did not know, using papers belonging to another child called Mohamed Farah. She took him to a flat in west London, tore up the paper with his relatives' contact details, and made him cook, clean and look after her children.
He was eventually allowed to go to school, where he spoke almost no English and was troubled and lonely. His PE teacher, Alan Watkinson, saw how he changed when he ran and, over years, got him out of the house he was living in, placed with a Somali family, and helped him gain British citizenship.
He became a decent junior runner and then, after moving to the United States to train, a great one. At the London Olympics in 2012 he won both the 5000 and 10,000 metres, and in Rio in 2016 he did the double again, one of only two men ever to do so. He won six world titles and was knighted in 2017.
He said he told his story so that other trafficked children might be believed. The Home Office confirmed no action would be taken against his citizenship.