50 years after 1976 Olympic gold, Edwin Moses is still running
On the afternoon of Sunday, July 25, 1976, Edwin Moses wasn’t wondering whether he would win Olympic gold.
He was on the clock.
Months before arriving in Montreal for the 1976 Summer Olympics, the 20-year-old Morehouse College student had memorized the Olympic schedule.
He knew precisely when each preliminary race would begin. He knew when the semifinals would start. And he knew the 400-meter hurdles final would leave the blocks at exactly 7:25 p.m.
“In my mind, I just had a date with destiny at 7:25,” Moses said recently, “I was 100% sure I was going to win unless I fell down. I knew that when 7:26 or 7:27 came around I’d be Olympic champion.”
This week marks the 50th anniversary of Moses’ first Olympic gold medal, a victory that launched one of the most dominant careers in track and field history. He would go on to win two more Olympic medals, break several records and become one of sport’s leading advocates in addressing pay equity and combating the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
“To be able to have been in the sports world for that long, for 50 years, and still have an impact, still enjoy the sport of track and field and see all the changes that needed to happen from 1976 on,” he said. “A lot of those changes I was involved in.”
Former Morehouse College President John Silvanus Wilson, then a Morehouse sophomore, watched the race from Philadelphia before returning to campus for the fall semester.
What stayed with him and his classmates was not just seeing Moses win, but seeing the tiny Black school in Atlanta represented on the world’s largest sporting stage.
“I will never forget the image and the magic of seeing … on national TV this guy with Morehouse across his chest running around that track and beating everybody,” Wilson said. “It was the most powerful image for me.”
For many Morehouse students, watching Moses in Montreal on a grainy black-and-white television was the first time they had actually seen him run.
Morehouse didn’t have a track. Moses trained wherever he could. None of his classmates ever watched him race live on campus.
A physics major at Morehouse, Moses approached the 400-meter hurdles scientifically. He counted every stride, filled notebooks with training data and eventually perfected the now-famous 13-step pattern between hurdles, while most of his rivals took 15.
For Wilson, Moses’ explanation of how he won was nearly as striking as the race itself.
“It wasn’t just the physical miracle that he executed,” Wilson said. “It was his brainpower was on display for the world because he was talking about, you know, calculating this and getting this down to 13 steps, between each hurdle.”
The technique reshaped the event and became the standard for generations of elite hurdlers.
Between 1977 and 1987 — nine years, nine months and nine days — Moses won 122 races in a row. He set the world record in the event four times.
But after his gold in Montreal, he missed the chance to defend his title when the United States boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics under President Jimmy Carter. He returned to win a second Olympic gold medal in Los Angeles in 1984 before earning bronze in Seoul four years later.
The decades that followed established Moses as one of the sport’s most influential reformers.
Long before athletes could earn endorsement income or openly profit from their success, he was pushing the Olympic movement beyond its amateur era, arguing for stipends, retirement protections and greater financial security for competitors.
After a widespread doping scandal rocked the sport in 1988, Moses became an early champion of out-of-competition drug testing and later helped institutionalize those efforts through the United States Anti-Doping Agency and other international sports organizations.
He still travels the world as a sought-out speaker, advocate, filmmaker and member of corporate and philanthropic boards.
His advocacy, he said, began with his own experience.
“At first it was in my own self-interest,” Moses said. “But then I started looking at the interests of the sport in general and the things that weren’t going right.”
For Moses, that confidence was rooted as much in Morehouse as it was in sport.
“Going to Morehouse had a lot to do with that,” said Moses, a native of Dayton, Ohio, who bypassed larger colleges in favor of an academic scholarship at Morehouse in 1973. “Being steeped in ethics and doing the right thing, learning the history of African American people and being trained to go out and make a difference.”
Wilson, now the executive director of the McGraw Center for Educational Leadership and a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, said Moses’ victory affirmed what students of that era were already being taught to believe about themselves.
The 1970s were an unusually rich period at Morehouse.
Moses graduated in 1978.
A year later, in 1979, Wilson, along with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Spike Lee, former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and Martin Luther King III graduated.
At the same time, Samuel L. Jackson was appearing in plays on campus.
Moses’ Olympic victory was extraordinary, Wilson said, but it did not seem out of place.
“We were very confident that in our own world, in our own way, in our own lane, whatever lane we’re in, we could go out and do the same thing, go out and focus and optimize and do some, do some world-class things,” Wilson said. “While we were very impressed and proud by what he did, nobody was surprised.”
What surprised Wilson came after Moses returned to Atlanta. One afternoon, Wilson was in the notoriously long cafeteria line when Moses walked in for the first time after returning from Montreal.
Students applauded. Moses acknowledged them, then took his place in the same slow-moving line as everyone else.
“It was like another day, man,” Wilson said, adding that Moses ate quickly then went to class. “He was about the business. He was back to business.”
When he was a student at Morehouse, the Atlanta school didn’t even have a track. Now the Edwin C. Moses Track and B.T. Harvey Stadium Football Field is a reminder that the athlete who arrived on campus without a home track now has one bearing his name.
The Montreal gold medal itself has never occupied much space in Moses’ life.
It remains his favorite of his three Olympic medals, a symbol of what he calls “pure athleticism, drive and determination.” But in the half century since he won it, the medal has spent far more time tucked away than on display.
For years it sat in a bank safe deposit box. Even now, it emerges only occasionally, usually for a visit to a school or a special event.
Few ever touch it.
“Aesthetically it’s beautiful,” Moses said. “It’s still in perfect condition because I never let people touch it without wiping it down afterward. Finger oils and acids can damage it.”
That protectiveness is rooted in perspective.
“To be honest,” he said, “I never even thought about getting the gold medal or standing on the victory podium. The only thing I thought about was being in the starting blocks when the gun went off.”
Every now and then, when he’s in the safe looking for something else, he’ll pause.
“I’ll pull it out,” he said, “look at it and polish it up.”