Moses, Edwin C.
Track and Field
b. Aug. 31, 1958, Dayton, OH
In high school, Moses was primarily a 400-meter dash man who also ran the 110-meter high hurdles. After graduating in 1973, he turned down athletic scholarships to accept an academic scholarship at Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he majored in engineering and physics.
There was no track team at Morehouse. In fact, the school didn't even have a track, but Moses continued training at high school facilities in Atlanta, eventually concentrating on the 400-meter hurdles. He became the first athlete to use just thirteen strides between hurdles.
He ran the event for just the second time in late March of 1976. Four months later, he won an Olympic gold medal in a record 47.64 seconds; his margin of victory, 1.05 seconds, is the largest in the Olympic history of the event.
That was no fluke. With the next two years, Moses was generally recognized as the greatest 400-meter hurdler ever. The 6-foot-2, 165-pounder lost to Harald Schmid of Germany on August 26, 1977. A week later, he beat Schmid by 15 yards, beginning a 102-race winning streak, including 89 finals, that stretched through nearly ten years and twenty-two countries.
Moses probably would have won a gold at the 1980 Olympics, but the U. S. boycotted the Moscow Games that year because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He did win a second gold in 1984, leading all the way. By that time, the 48-second barrier in the event had been broken 32 times, and Moses and done it 27 of those times. He also had the nine fastest clockings ever, including a world record 47.02 in August of 1983. (That has since been broken by Kevin Young.)
The winner of the 1983 Sullivan Award as the nation's outstanding amateur athlete, Moses won world championships in 1983 and 1987 and was the national outdoor champion in 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1983, and 1987. Because of lack and back injuries, he was out of competition for nearly two years, from August of 1984 to June of 1986. Moses retired after finishing third at the 1988 Olympics.
Moses was instrumental in persuading The Athletics Congress, the national governing body for track and field, to establish the Athletes Trust Fund program. He also helped convince the International Olympic Committee that the program was a sound idea, and the IOC ratified the concept in late 1981. Under the program, athletes create accounts in which stipends and other payments, including money from commercial endorsements, can be deposited. Money can also be withdraw for training and other expenses without jeopardizing Olympic eligibility.
From 1983 through 1989, Moses was an athlete member of The Athletics Congress. During that period, he created and designed the first random, out-of-competition drug testing programs for athletes.