Hurdler Edwin Moses remained unbeaten for nine years, nine months and nine days. He initially wanted to become a physicist and not an Olympic champion. In the interview he talks about his amazing life, which has now been made into a film.
Even at almost 70 years old, he is still as flexible as he used to be as a professional athlete. During the conversation with t-online, Edwin Moses pulls his right leg up to shoulder height while sitting to demonstrate that he was unable to train on hard surfaces at the time due to growing pains. And the two-time Olympic champion over 400 meters hurdles, whose impressive series of 122 victories in a row between 1977 and 1987 has now been filmed in the cinema documentary “13 Steps”, also appears to be so present during his active time.
t-online: Mr. Moses, in the documentary about your life that was released in December, you described the 400 meter hurdles as a “disaster with an announcement”. Why?
Edwin Moses: A lot of things can go wrong in a 400 meter hurdles race. That is the premise of the race. For each hurdle you have a take-off point and a landing point, as well as the time in the air in between. If you multiply that by ten hurdles, there are 30 ways to make a mistake. Then there is the start. There are many places where things can get out of control.
The race is also considered one of the most painful in athletics – if not the most painful of all. Why did you decide to do it anyway?
When I saw John Akii-Bua (an athlete from Uganda, editor’s note) with the gold medal around his neck at the 1972 Munich Olympics, he became my hero. I was in high school at the time. But I never would have dreamed of competing in the Olympic Games myself four years later (laughs). It was a stroke of luck for me that I got better and better after that and developed at the right time.
After high school, Moses studied physics at the historically African-American Morehouse College. There was a strong sense of cohesion at the renowned university in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King had studied. At that time, blacks in America were not allowed to study in educational institutions for whites. That’s why black-only colleges emerged.
With horn-rimmed glasses and a thin build, as a young man you didn’t exactly look like a future Olympic champion. In the film, she describes a fellow student as a “nerd among nerds,” and director Spike Lee says, “With his glasses and if you didn’t see him running, maybe he was the only one who believed in his success.” Where did that come from?
To be honest, I didn’t know I would be successful until it happened. There was no major athletics program at Morehouse College. It was just about getting out and exercising. If you weren’t that good, that was okay too. It wasn’t a big sports university with lots of coaches and equipment.
It was just an extracurricular activity for me. I enjoyed running, was pretty good at it, but was far from a world-class runner. Then I developed very quickly. Actually, only my fellow students were aware of it at the time because they saw how my times were getting better and better. At some point I projected myself where I could be in three, six or twelve weeks if things continue like this. So I finally believed that I could qualify for the 1976 Olympic Games.
However, the conditions for this were rather modest. They didn’t even have a tartan track at Morehouse College and practiced on a golf course.
True. On many days there was simply no other training option. When I started studying, I didn’t have a car and the stadium was a short distance away. There was no bus either, and when I wanted to train and there was no one with a car nearby, I went to the nearby golf course. That was the easiest thing (laughs) and also better for my joints. Because in the stadium we only had a concrete track and when I ran there I had severe leg pain.