Olympic runner, Mo Farah has a message for struggling Gen Z: ‘I was a child trafficked, but I never gave up on myself’ |
Olympic runner, Mo Farah has a message for struggling Gen Z: ‘I was a child trafficked, but I never gave up on myself’
It’s no secret that Gen Z is struggling. They’re unemployed in the millions, feeling anxious about the future, and getting told that their shot at building a career is about to get bleaker thanks to AI. But few understand what it’s like to feel the odds are stacked against you before you even start, quite like Sir Mo Farah.
And the Olympic legend has a no-nonsense message for young people: Don’t let a bad hand stop you from playing the game. Life will knock you down, but your success is your responsibility.
“Even for myself, you would have said as a young boy, ‘he’s not gonna make, you don’t have a chance,’” Farah told Fortune. “I was child trafficked into the U.K. with my own story struggle. But I never gave up on myself.”
The former long-distance runner and four-time Olympic gold medalist was born as Hussein Abdi Kahin in what is now Somaliland. His father was killed in the Civil War when he was four, and he was separated from his family, including a twin brother, soon after. Around the age of nine, he was taken illegally to the U.K. by a woman he’d never met, given fake documents under the name “Mohamed Farah,” and then was forced to cook, clean, and change nappies while........