Olympic Champion Edwin Moses Runs His Own Race

In May 1976, physics major Edwin Moses met with Hugh Gloster, the president of Morehouse College. The school’s track team—already on the chopping block—needed $3,000 to send Moses and a volunteer coach to the national championship and Olympic trials in the 400-meter hurdles. It was a race Moses had run just three times, but he had the fastest time in the world.

“Do you really think you’re going to win a gold medal?” asked Gloster, who knew very little about track.

“Dr. Gloster, by the time I get to the Olympic Games, I’ll be able to break the world record and win the gold medal,” Moses responded, detailing his meticulous training plan.

He must have been convincing; he left the office with $3,000. And, true to his word, he returned as an Olympic champion who held the world record.

Some might call Moses headstrong— a quality that he accepts and credits for much of his success in running and in physics.

As a kid, Moses enjoyed reading his father’s anatomy and biochemistry books, along with the Encyclopedia Britannica. He fell in love with science and took as many math and science classes as he could in school. Especially chemistry.

“I was brilliant in chemistry. I took two years in high school and organic chemistry before I got to college,” Moses says. The professor from Central State who taught Moses in a summer organic chemistry class had to create an advanced lab just for Moses and a classmate. Bored at the pace of the class, they had started making their version of bang snap fireworks and putting them on toilet seats and doorknobs as pranks. “Everything was out of control,” Moses laughs. “He had to take us and put us in a whole different lab, give us other stuff to do that was matching our aptitude.”

At the same time, Moses developed a love for running the 400-meter race and high hurdles in track. He was good, but not great, he says. Still awaiting a growth spurt, he won events at some major meets but didn’t garner enough attention to secure a college scholarship.

Moses entered Morehouse College as a chemistry major and walked on to the track team. With little money and no track of their own, the team trained on another school’s concrete track, repeating the same drills over and over again. Moses had finally started growing, and the repetitive stress was too much for his legs. He told the coach he couldn’t do the drills—and was booted from the team.

“But he couldn’t kick me off the track because the track belonged to another school, and I could go there anytime I wanted,” Moses says. “And so I just kept training and running, doing what I did.” When the team went to the track, so would he.

Moses created his own training plan, recording detailed notes about each run and analyzing them later. He dug deep into the science of running, nutrition, and stretching on his own. And he kept improving. The coach eventually noticed and began to enter Moses in meets. Still, Moses took direction only from himself.

Moses’s tendency to do things his own way also caught up with him academically. He and a professor went head-to-head—not on the answers to chemistry questions but on how to do chemistry. “I was doing it right and getting the right answers, but he didn’t like my methodology,” Moses says. Pulling rank, the professor lowered Moses’s grade. In response, Moses switched to physics.

Managing the most difficult major at Morehouse and competitive running was challenging.

By Moses’s second year at Morehouse, the track coach quit. Practice started at 4 p.m., but the team’s first task was to find an open track. “We’d send out scouts to see if there was a track [free], and they would find a pay phone to call back to the track office and tell us whether the track was open or closed.” Often, the team didn’t even get to a track until 5 p.m. Moses’s physics classmates had already studied for a couple of hours, relaxed, and had dinner by the time he was ready to hit the books.

“It was tough, but I was focused. I didn’t do fraternities. I didn’t do any of the clubs. I didn’t have time to hang out. I always had a backpack with books in it,” he says. “I’d stay up till two in the morning every night, and then get up at six to go run. I’d take naps during the day.”

The track team eventually recruited a volunteer coach named Lloyd Jackson. He’d run track but wasn’t really a “coach.” Still, he was enthusiastic and committed to the team, and he counted as a chaperone. “We had to have someone who could rent cars,” Moses recalls.

He didn’t set out to run the 400-meter hurdles, but in the fall of 1975, Jackson suggested Moses try it at the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference track tournament. In honor of his hero, John Akii-Bua of Uganda, the 1972 Olympic gold medalist in the 400-meter hurdles, Moses agreed to give it a shot.

“I ran a time of 50.1 seconds, which was a world-class time,” he says.

In less than a minute, he’d gone from an unknown in the event to an Olympic trial qualifier. It was a goal he’d never considered before in a race he’d never run before. He qualified in two other events as well, but decided to focus on the hurdles.

With a singular focus, he trained. And trained. By the time he reached the games in Montreal, Moses was ready.

“The whole thing was really choreographed,” he says. “I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew the training regimen. I knew how to rest and save my energy.” For six months he’d prepared for exactly what to do when the gun went off on July 25th, 1976, at 5:30 p.m., the Olympic finals.

The next 47.63 seconds changed the entire trajectory of Moses’s life. By 5:31 p.m., he was an Olympic champion with a world record.

“That came from going to a school like Morehouse College,” he says. The historically Black college had around 1,100 students at the time, and its supportive, collaborative environment made all the difference for Moses. “The energy level that we had in the level of academics, preparation, nurturing, being around professors that really care . . . You [didn’t] have to struggle and fight,” he says. It was a community in which he could really focus.

When he arrived back at school that fall, the track team wasn’t on the chopping block anymore.

Moses continued competing—and winning—while at Morehouse, graduating with a BS in physics. He became a test engineer at General Dynamics after graduation, then took a leave of absence to prepare for the 1980 Olympics. By then he’d broken his own world record twice and was running at his absolute best.

In January of 1980, however, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would boycott the Moscow Olympics in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. It was crushing news, but Moses continued training, running the European circuit, and supporting himself through endorsements. He didn’t watch the 1980 Olympics but went on to beat the winners of his event in subsequent races. The US Olympic team later received Congressional Gold Medals for their sacrifice.

Moses took gold again at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, basing his training program on years of personal data and analysis—scientific methodology, he says. No one else was using logbooks yet, but he noted the details of each training run: weather, wind, track dimensions, heart rate, distance. “I’ve run 27,000 miles in my life, enough to go around the equator, all of it logged,” he says. When he got a computer, he turned the data into spreadsheets and graphs to maximize his training, in addition to pioneering the use of electronic monitors, ice baths, and other innovative techniques now widespread in the world of professional athletes.

For this bottom-up approach, Moses credits his experience at Morehouse. The classes used grad school textbooks, he recalls. The students had to do everything with a slide rule and pencil and paper and keep equations, formulas, and identities in their heads. No multiple choice, no shortcuts. “It was an exercise in how to be excellent,” Moses says. “We were prepared that way, the old-fashioned way.”

Between August 1977 and June 1987, Moses won 122 consecutive races—a record-breaking winning streak spanning nine years, nine months, and nine days. In 1988, Moses returned to the Olympics for the last time, winning bronze in Seoul, South Korea, despite beating his previous Olympic times. It was one of the rare occasions when runners edged by him in the 400-meter hurdles.

“I loved running, loved the training process, loved the piece where you’re just improving little by little. And it’s measurable. You can measure everything,” he says. “I wasn’t afraid to train. And so I was the one who went to the top.”

Although he holds physics close, Moses never returned to General Dynamics or work in STEM. After retiring from professional running, he earned an MBA and spent a few years working for an investment firm. However, he has spent most of his career working with organizations, think tanks, and foundations to improve sports and improve the world through sports. He’s received an honorary doctorate and countless national and international awards and honors.

Moses is a writer, speaker, advocate, diplomat, and chair emeritus of the US Anti-Doping Agency, which he helped start. He’s also the founding chair of the Laureus World Sports Academy, a philanthropic organization supporting programs all over the world that use sports as a tool for social change. Morehouse now has a track named for Moses, and he’s an active member of the campus community. In 2024 he was a keynote speaker at the American Institute of Physics TEAM-UP Together Student Experience Conference.

“Those kinds of things are more important to me than the medals. At the end of the day, I never even think about the medals,” he says. “That was my job. That’s not who I am.”