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18 April 2024

Edwin Moses: The 'man no one could beat'

Edwin Moses of the USA clears a hurdle en route to his victory in the men's 400m hurdles final at the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, California. (David Cannon/Allsport)

Published
By AFP

Rarely has an athlete exerted such sustained dominance as American 400m hurdler Moses, who won an astonishing 122 consecutive races from 1977 to 1987 and picked up two Olympic gold medals, in one of the great athletics careers.

For nine years, nine months and nine days, nobody finished in front of Moses, who set four world records in the process.

At the 1976 Montreal Olympics, his first international event, 20-year-old Moses won the 400m hurdles by eight metres, the largest margin of victory in the event's history, also breaking the world record.

Moses missed the 1980 Moscow Games because of the US boycott, but won a second gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 and a bronze at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, when he was 33.

When asked how he wanted to be remembered, Moses once said: "Hopefully, as the guy nobody could beat."

His final world record of 47.02sec was set in 1983 and was only broken by the current holder, Kevin Young, in 1992, when he ran 46.78 in the Barcelona Olympics final.