Ali Omar Sheegow was born in the Somalian coastal village of Mareeg in 1929. Just prior to Somalia gaining independence from Italy in 1960, Sheegow was one of a dozen men who took over the control of the Somali Sports Administration in the late 1950s. In December 1959 he then became the first President of the newly-founded Somali Olympic Committee. The project, however, was later abandoned, before a completely new NOC was established in 1971. When civil war broke out a decade later, Sheegow left the country, first living in Roma, before moving to Manchester in England. He remained in the English city until his death in May 2019 at the age of 94.
Somalia