Not long after Edwin Moses figured out how to tackle the ultimate math problem of track, he transformed himself into the greatest hurdler in history.
That, in turn, gave the engineer-turned-Olympic champion the platform to tackle tougher issues that, even today, more than 40 years later, no one has been able to fully untangle.
The title of a new documentary about Moses, ’13 Steps’, pays tribute to the then-revolutionary number of steps the track star took between the ten barriers in the notoriously painful 400-meter hurdles – a race in which he started 122 times in a row. stood. for a period of 9 years, 9 months and 9 days without being defeated.
“Everyone is angry about something, but what can you do and what are you going to do?” Moses says in the film, reflecting on the role he played after becoming one of the circuit’s brightest lights in the 1970s and 1980s.
The film, which debuts to audiences Saturday at his alma mater, Morehouse College, dissects Moses’ role in three issues that remain unresolved: fair pay for athletes in track and field and the Olympics; doping; and racial equality in America.
Born in 1955, Moses was 13 when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists on the medal stand at the Mexico City Olympics, gestures that made them pariahs for decades both inside and outside the Olympic movement.
Those lessons left the world’s best hurdler in no position to follow suit when he won in 1976. Some tried to portray his victory lap in Montreal with his white American teammate Mike Shine as something bigger, but as Moses says in an interview shortly afterwards After those Olympics, he simply saw it as a sudden burst of unsymbolic happiness.
Yet “13 Steps” shows that race plays a significant role in many of Moses’ biggest life decisions, including his enrollment at Morehouse, a historically black college in Atlanta. Interviews with fellow alumni Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson, along with a who’s-who of Olympians, sports lawyers, childhood friends, and even famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, make up Moses’ story.
German filmmaker Leopold Hoesch, who has made documentaries on everyone from Snoop Dogg to King Charles, has collected hours of archival footage both on and off the track, including newsreel clips of Moses’ arrest on charges of soliciting a prostitute on the Sunset Comic in the United States. 80s.
Moses insisted he was framed by a corrupt LA police department, so he fought the case all the way through the court system and won. He had no problem with the inclusion of that potentially reputation-altering and now all but forgotten episode in the film “because it happened, and you can’t remember things like that.”
“I had to go on the witness stand and testify against seven police officers who are all lying and the jury has to believe all of them or you,” Moses said in an interview with The Associated Press. “That was the most moving part of the case, the fact that I had to experience that.”
The film also documents Moses’ activist role in the anti-doping world, a world that has made great strides but is in some ways as reprehensible today as it was when Ben Johnson spawned the modern movement with his infamous positive test for steroids at the Olympics. 1988 Games in Seoul.
Before that, Moses spent a career trying to get himself and his rivals paid.
He remembers his first paid race: a $600 appearance in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1977. Years later, as he prepared for a race in Cologne, Germany, where a crowd of 60,000 was expected, a light went out.
Why was everyone but the athletes making money?
“It made no sense. I was a radical from the start. If we didn’t get what we deserved, we just didn’t run,” Moses says in the film.
Track fans who watch this film may recoil at the sad fact that some of the compensation Moses and his colleagues received at the end of their careers is about the same as what some runners get today.
At least they get something. The film claims that they probably owe this in part to Moses.
Long before he made himself famous, Moses – who built a career in aerospace engineering alongside his success on the track – did the calculations and concluded that those running closest to the inside line on the track could shave fractions of seconds by shave between 12 and 20 seconds. 6 feet from their path around the oval.
To do that, he had to take off over the barriers of his left foot. The film explains how Moses put the plan into action by taking 13 steps between obstacles, while most would have taken 14 or 15 and jumped off their right foot.
“He literally changed the sport in one year,” noted coach Bobby Kersee says in the film.
That, as the rest of the film shows, turned out to be the easy part.
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Summer Olympics AP: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games
