Track & field athletics statistics
World and Swedish all-time lists
http://w1.196.telia.com/~u19603668/athletics_all-time_best.htm

----- Original Message -----
From: "Eamonn Condon" <eamonn@...>
To: "Track & Field" <t-and-f@...>
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 4:07 AM
Subject: t-and-f: Moses a force for good


> The Electronic Telegraph
> Wednesday 7 February 2001
> Andrew Baker
>
> EDWIN MOSES is not a typical customer of the Capital Grille at 601
> Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. He dislikes red meat, while most of his
> fellow diners are tucking into near-raw steaks the size of their faces. He
> dislikes politics, while most of his fellow diners are either politicians or
> hangers-on sharing out the goodies in the aftermath of the inauguration of
> President George W Bush. He has two Olympic gold medals and was once the
> most invincible athlete on the planet, while the closest that most of his
> fellow diners will get to meaningful exercise is raising a hand to summon a
> waiter.
>
> So what is Edwin Moses doing here? It's just a feeding station, truth to
> tell, time to hoover up a plate of shrimp linguine and a glass of fine wine
> before hitting the hotel bed. Tomorrow he's in Richmond, Virginia; the day
> after that, New York; the day after that, back home in Atlanta. The Capital
> Grille is a blip on the schedule as Edwin Moses adds another line to his
> bulging CV.
>
> To any follower of athletics, Moses, now 45, will need no introduction. He
> is no longer besieged by adoring fans, but if you spend a little time in his
> company you will notice that periodically grown males will bashfully
> approach and ask for an autograph or a snapshot, or simply shake him by the
> hand and express their gratitude.
>
> All are graciously treated by the lean, rangy man with the trademark scrubby
> beard (now greying at the edges) and glasses. Moses does not seek adulation,
> he will tell you, or court the media. The last thing he wants is a scrum of
> autograph-seekers. But no way is he going to disdain a little admiring
> attention.
>
> He has earned it. Edwin C Moses owned the 400 metres hurdles event for a
> decade. Between August 1977 and May 1987, he won 122 races in succession. It
> is, and will long remain, the greatest sequence of consecutive victories
> compiled by an athlete. In the process he collected Olympic gold at Montreal
> and Los Angeles, and would surely have added another had the US team not
> boycotted the Moscow Games of 1980. The world record he set in 1983,
> 47.02sec, would endure for another nine years.
>
> Did he feel invincible then? A slow nod, and a slow grin. "I just
> out-trained everybody else," he recalled. "I knew what everybody else was
> doing, and I knew that I was doing more. I was training six hours a day in
> three or four sessions, sometimes into the evenings. I used no stimulants,
> no drugs of any kind. I just thought of everything, and I had it
> compartmentalized, and that gave me mental strength. I just knew I wasn't
> going to be beaten."
>
> There are clues in the account of Moses's competitive career to his course
> of action when he finally hung up his spikes, after taking a valedictory
> bronze medal at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. The powerful intellect, will to
> succeed and dislike of drugs and those who used them were all harnessed in
> the campaign Moses led to establish random out-of-competition testing for
> athletes.
>
> It is an initiative that he feels has been inadequately followed by his
> country's Olympic authorities in recent years. The posturing and allegations
> of cheating that dogged the US athletics squad in Sydney sadden him. "When I
> was with the US Olympic Committee, I was willing to stand up and fight for
> what's right," he said. "Now they don't have anybody willing to fight, and
> they're at the bottom of the pile again."
>
> The politics and back-stabbing of the American sporting scene hold little
> appeal for Moses. These days his main focus is on his work as chairman of
> the World Sports Academy. The purpose of the academy, which comprises an
> extraordinary array of international sporting legends, is twofold: to elect
> the winners of the annual Laureus Sports Awards, and to direct the
> activities of the Sport for Good Foundation, the charitable offshoot of the
> awards, which has $1 million to spend.
>
> There is a certain element of swank about the awards, which are presented at
> a star-studded gala reception in Monte Carlo. This is an occasion that can
> arouse in cynical hearts questions about the purpose and value of the
> proceedings, and the necessity of garlanding the already successful with
> further accolades.
>
> "Monte Carlo is part of getting to the solution of problems," Moses said.
> "The projects are the problems we're trying to solve, and the academy is the
> bridge between the party and the problems." In other words, the fame of the
> sports stars at the awards generates sponsorship for the charitable
> operations which the stars themselves will oversee.
>
> "Look, it's easy to have a big bash in Monte Carlo and then do nothing until
> the end of the year," Moses said. "We will show the results, and we will
> show the evidence of what we've done."
>
> A certain weight was added to this statement by the fact that it was made
> not in the Capital Grille but in the national headquarters of the Midnight
> Basketball League, in an office suite above a shopping mall in Richmond,
> Virginia.
>
> The MBL is emblematic of the kind of project that the Sport for Good
> Foundation aims to support. It attracts the disadvantaged young men of
> American cities to play basketball in the dead of night, when they might
> otherwise be nefariously employed. They must be frisked for drugs and
> weapons on arrival at the game, and before the tip-off they must listen to
> an educational lecture. It works: it cannot be coincidental that in
> Richmond, homicides have fallen from 160 a year to 74 while the scheme has
> been running.
>
> Moses gave good value when he attended an MBL game at a sports center in a
> Richmond suburb last Wednesday evening. The young players may have had only
> a hazy notion of who he was, but they could see that he was a rich and
> successful black athlete, that he had helped to raise money for their
> league, and chosen to spend an evening with them when he did not have to.
> That they appreciated, probably rather more than the startlingly graphic
> talk on safe sex that preceded the match.
>
> "Sport can be a real influence," Moses explained. "If it's used in the right
> way it can be very powerful. Ten years ago, with Live Aid and so on, music
> was the catalyst. Now it's sport. We don't need to tell the MBL, or our
> other projects, what to do - we just need to support them."
>
> There is no mistaking the satisfaction that Moses takes in his role as
> academy chairman. It fulfils his need to be constantly mobile among
> international movers and shakers, but also his laudable desire to ensure
> that wealth and fame are applied to doing good.
>
> Yet there remains a wistfulness about Moses, a restless melancholy. He lives
> alone in Atlanta (though he has a five-year-old son) and passes his rare
> spare hours in the kitchen. "I can cook anything," he said. "It's a peaceful
> thing to do. It gives you a good feeling."
>
> But no feeling, whether generated by doing good or cooking well, can
> replicate the thrill of athletics and the adrenalin surge of victory. "I'll
> never be able to replace that gladiator lifestyle I led on the track," he
> said. "It's one of the pleasant curses of being great at something. Maybe
> one day I'll find something to replace it. Maybe I will . . . "
>