Do we like them?

Do we like Mo Farah?

Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or company found, a brave public telling of his own story, and charity work, with only a few old rows and the thin record keeping it from a 9.

Here's the thing about Mo: the name on his passport isn't the one he was born with. In a 2022 BBC documentary he said his real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin, that his father was killed in civil war when he was about four, and that he was flown to Britain at around nine by a woman he'd never met, on papers with another child's name.

He says he was put to work doing housework and childcare for a household in exchange for food, and was threatened that he'd never see his family again if he talked. He'd previously said he arrived as a refugee from Somalia with his parents. That's quite the thing to tell the world when your citizenship is in the balance.

It didn't cost him. A Home Office statement said no action whatsoever would be taken against him. A lawyer told him that revoking his citizenship, obtained in 2000, was unlikely given he was a trafficking victim. He still said he needed to tell the story, and that took guts for a national hero with a knighthood.

The one shadow over his career was his coach, Alberto Salazar, who was banned for four years for doping violations in 2019. Farah has not been accused of any wrongdoing. He said the link cost him financially and emotionally, and told Sky Sports he knew he'd never done anything wrong. That's a reputational dent, not a mark against his character.

On the harm check, the record is clean as far as we could find. When Donald Trump's 2017 travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries left him unsure he could get home to his family, he called the policy discriminatory and divisive. We found nothing from him on trans people or LGBTQ+ rights either way, and nothing about dodgy collaborators, so that's a pass based on a quiet record rather than a loud one.

The good stuff is real. He was knighted after defending his 5,000m and 10,000m titles at Rio 2016, the first British track and field athlete with four Olympic golds. His foundation reportedly gave £100,000 to Save the Children's East Africa appeal in 2017, aimed at children in northern Somalia.