Olympic gold medalist Edwin Moses is a national treasure. Although the track and field star is best known for his masterful 400-meter hurdles winning streak of 9 years, 9 months, and 9 days, the proud Morehouse man is excited to share his full story through the new documentary, “MOSES – 13 Steps.”
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A documentary is one thing, but going almost 10 years without losing a race on the international stage sounds superhuman. It’s been reported that your athletic and academic experience at Morehouse played a critical part in obtaining your success. Were you also a standout athlete in high school?
I really wasn’t that good. I was totally unrecruitable coming out of high school. I was one of the smaller kids for my age at that time, and I was on the academic side. I took chemistry, biology, physics, all the mathematics, computer science, I took all that.
I was not really all that great in high school, so I was not considered for a scholarship anywhere on anyone’s track team. So I came to Morehouse on an academic scholarship in the dual degree program, and basically just walked on the track team because I loved the sport.
My experience in track and field was being the smartest, tiniest guy. At the back of the pack and as the practice goes further and further, I’m moving up and up and up. So I was always a little kid chasing the big guys, and chasing them down. I always got beat until I didn’t.
Until 1976, I always lost until I won. And then once I started winning, I always won until I lost 10 years later again. It’s like a fantasy story that had I not gone to Morehouse and been in that environment probably would have never happened, no matter what kind of codes or what kind of facilities I had. It was just being at that point in my life at 17 years old, back in the early 70s, matriculating at Morehouse. Being around a group of guys who really enjoyed the sport and doing my science. That’s what happened. That’s what the film portrays.
Your signature race was the 400-meter hurdles. Your background in physics mathematics, and science is what helped you discover that taking 13 steps in between each hurdle led to your fastest times. What did your peers and the media think when they discovered the formula you came up with?
I never talked about it. Until recently, I’ve never discussed it until this film.
Brilliant. From Spike Lee to Samuel L. Jackson to Neil deGrasse Tyson to Lonnie Bunch from the California African American Museum, you have some amazing talent on board to help tell your story. You even have Morgan Freeman as an executive producer.
Well, they became a part of the story. They became the vehicles to tell my story, because of what they were doing, what they saw, where they were, and how that juxtaposed with what my life was going through during the late ’70s and what we were all exposed to. They tell the story, versus me just narrating how I did this and how I did that.
Your historic winning streak was a global phenomenon, that began in 1977. There’s no way it should have taken this long for this documentary and several other movie and television deals.
My story has never really been picked up by some of the channels that do sports and do films on sports people. After 48 years, my name has never been brought up and my story has never been brought up. I’m very selfish when it comes to the story because it has to be right. The last thing that I would have wanted was someone to bootleg together a biography on Edwin Moses just throw anything out there the way that they wanted.
Stories of academics, excellence, having a military father, and going to an HBCU or being an engineer and doing everything that you’re supposed to do. Those kind of stories were not interesting. So I’m just glad that I found the people to tell the story in the correct way, and at the end of the day I’m super happy to premiere the film at Morehouse.
