Edwin Moses’ First Defining Moment
by Steve McGill
I haven’t done a “Great Race” article in a few months, so I want to get back to it with this issue. In another article in this issue, A 400H Explosion,” I discuss how young hurdlers Benjamin Rai and Abderrahman Samba have pushed the event forward with their historically significant races this summer. So of course, when anyone does anything big in the men’s 400 hurdles, comparisons to Edwin Moses are going to be relevant. Moses, a master technician and race strategist who also had a personal best of 13.60 in the 110 hurdles, set the standard for excellence in the 400 hurdles – a standard that all aspiring 400h greats are measured against.
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Since Benjamin burst on the scene this year with his 47.02 (equaling Moses’ personal best), and Samba burst on the scene with a series of sub-47’s and a huge 46.98 personal best, I figured it would make sense to look back on the race in which Moses burst onto the scene – his astounding 47.64 at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, Canada. The time was good for a new world record at the time – a record that Moses would go on to break several more times in a dominant career that was as awe-inspiring as that of any athlete in track & field history. Even today, 42 years later, his time in that race would be competitive in any Olympic or World Championship final, and would most likely still put him on the medal stand. That’s how far ahead of his time he was.
What is also quite amazing about the race is that Moses was a relative newcomer to the event in 1976. He had only taken up the 400h seriously one year prior, and he just kept dropping time every race. With his freakishly long legs, exceptional work ethic, famously meticulous attention to detail, and extraordinary will to win, he had all the attributes necessary to take the event into the stratosphere.
And that’s exactly what he did, starting with that Olympic final. Prior to Moses, hurdlers who 13-stepped between the hurdles all the way around the track were as rare as healthy snacks at McDonalds. Yet he 13-stepped with such grace and apparent ease you’d’ve thought he was going for a jog in the park. An engineering major in college, with an acutely analytical mind, Moses did the math and figured out exactly how long each stride needed to be. Then, he put in the training to ensure that he could execute the race plan effectively. This no-nonsense, practical approach made him a monster of a competitor, because he was always in control of what he was doing.
In this race, Moses got out fast and stayed fast. There were others who got out fast, but none of them could sustain it like Moses could. By the end of the second curve it was obvious that he was in a race all by himself, and that he was in a class by himself. If all these guys running in the 48’s and 49’s were world class, then yes, Moses was in his own class.
Another great story in this race is the performance of silver medalist Mike Shine, out of the small town of Youngsville, PA. While Moses 13-stepped the whole way around the track, Shine 15-stepped the whole way. If you had asked anyone with any knowledge of the 400 hurdles, no one would have believed that a 15-stepper could run fast enough to earn an Olympic silver medal. One of the most endearing moments of the 1976 Olympics was watching Moses and Shine hug each other and then take a joyous victory lap together. In the previous two Olympics, there had been plenty of racial strife dividing Americans and pitting them against each other, but the embrace and unrehearsed celebration of Moses and Shine reminded us all that sports, can, in fact, bring us together, regardless of race, ethnicity, and social background.
Another storyline that is often forgotten when discussing this race is that 1972 Olympic champion John Akii Bua was not in it. His country, Uganda, led by dictator Idi Amin, boycotted the Montreal Games for political reasons. Akii Bua had run 47.82 out of lane one in the Munich Games to capture the gold. In Montreal, he was ready to run and defend his title, but Amin pulled the team out of the Games at the last minute. One of the saddest consequences of that ill-advised choice is that we will never know what would’ve happened had Moses and Akii Bua had the opportunity to compete head-to-head. While Moses went on to have the greatest career in the history of the event, and to then do much philanthropic work post-career, Akii Bua returned home to a country ravaged by war and bloodshed, and ended up passing away from this world at the age of 47.
I was nine years old at the time of the 1976 Olympics. Obviously, Moses’ race left an indelible impression upon me. Little did I know at the time, however, that, with that race, Moses had established a standard of excellence that hurdlers would strive to achieve for subsequent generations, to this very day.
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