Piers Morgan has praised Sir Mo Farah for sharing the harrowing story of being trafficked, but has a bone to pick with him after he heard a different version of his childhood on Life Stories seven years ago.
The former GMB presenter interviewed the Team GB athlete on his show, Life Stories, in 2015 where Mo understandably discussed a very different version of his childhood.
Despite Mo carrying the agonising secret to protect himself from losing his British citizenship, Piers has written in his column for The Sun that the Olympian "looked me straight in the eye in front of millions of people – and lied through his back teeth".
At the time, Mo told Piers that he moved to England with his mother during the war in Somalia. He said he reunited with his father who was already working in London.
However, this week the Olympic gold medallist bravely revealed that he was illegally trafficked to the UK from Djibouti under a name of another child when he was nine years old.
Mo, whose father died four years prior in the civil war, was then made to be a servant for another family's children.
Upon hearing the harrowing story, Piers praised the British runner for opening up about what he went through.
Piers said he was 'gobsmacked' by the news but understood why the athlete kept the 'shocking and extraordinary' story to himself for 30 years.
"Who could blame him for not wanting us to know how he really came here?" he wrote for The Sun.
"Imagine the sickening nagging worry he must have had for 30 years, as his success and fame rocketed, that the truth might one day come out about his unlawful immigrant status and he could lose both his British citizenship and with it, the knighthood that means so much to him?"
Following the news of Sir Mo being brought into the country under a false identity, the Home Office stated 'no action' will be taken against him.
"If anyone has earned the right to stay here then it is surely Sir Mo Farah, a man who overcame so much personal tragedy and hardship to light up world athletics and be rewarded for his astonishing success with a sword-tap on the shoulder from his grateful Queen," Piers said of the star.
In the powerful documentary, The Real Mo Farah, the long-distance runner reveals his name isn't Mo Farah but Hussein Abdi Kahin and that he grew up during the Somali civil war.
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In 1993, he was smuggled to Britain instead of the real Mohamed Farah, who still lives in Somalia and has never been to the UK.
Mo's journey to the UK began when his mother, Aisha, sent him and his twin brother to Djibouti to live with an uncle during the height of the Somali civil war, which cost the life of his father, Abdi, who was killed by shrapnel from a bazooka while tending his cattle.
The woman who brought him in pretended to be his mother after using false documents to enter the country to work for the family with younger children.
This is when he realised he had taken someone else's place after the man met them at the airport wondering where his son was.
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