Edwin Moses, a Champion Then, a Champion Now

Twenty five years ago this week, a lanky physics graduate from Morehouse College in Atlanta put on the line -- no, put on the highest of high wires -- what was already one of the most amazing winning streaks in sports history. He was Edwin Moses. The high theater was the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The streak was Moses' consecutive wins in the men's 400-meter hurdles, 102 at the time.

Moses came through. He won every heat in L.A. as well as the gold-medal final just as he had won every heat and final since September 1977. He went on to win every heat and final after L.A., until Danny Harris beat him at a meet in Madrid in June 1987.

What Moses wound up stringing together was a streak most of us, including him, thought no one would top -- nine years, nine months and nine days. But someone soon will. He is, quite appropriately, Moses.

"You're the first person to really point that out," Moses told me with a chuckle by phone last week from his West Coast home.

Moses, who was back at the L.A. Coliseum recently for a celebration of the '84 Olympics, is nine years and two months into his chairmanship of an organization called the Laureus World Sports Academy. It was born in May 2000 with the idea of using sports to effect social change, particular for the world's youth. Or as a most-famous athlete-turned-activist, Nelson Mandela, stated at Laureus' inaugural awards banquet in 2000: "Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination."

Moses has been so successful at carrying out Mandela's words that the University of Massachusetts at Boston last May during its commencement awarded Moses an honorary doctor of science degree.

"We're like social workers," Moses explained. "We don't go out and train, we don't build basketball courts or teach kids to play tennis. We don't do anything like that. We use sports as a tool to capture the attention of the kids and then have social agencies deal with their problems."

Moses said he is still most proud of his athletic achievements. I think what he's done since hanging up his spikes is more impressive.

After all, too many athletes nowadays seem to struggle to regain their footing once their playing days are over. It seems they either get a job in an announcers' booth, or flounder.

Moses has never been like most athletes, however, on the field of play and now off of it. Behind his cool aviator shades, he was mathematical in his approach to setting world records, capturing gold medals and winning almost every event he entered for roughly a decade. Thirteen steps he took between the hurdles -- not what was the standard then of 14, and no less. Behind his desk for London-based Laureus, which is funded by major European corporations like Mercedes Benz and Vodafone, he's grown Laureus' projects from six in four different countries nine years ago to 70 in 38 different countries today.

"Sports is one of the universal languages along with love and music and art," the thoughtful Moses said in his easygoing manner that always belied his competitiveness. "We're trying to help kids have a better life from kids who are living in Cambodia where there are landmines to midnight basketball in Richmond, Va., where gang conflicts were a big part of life.

"We even had a project in Kenya, a youth soccer association that has over 1,100 teams, that was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize."

That was the Mathare Youth Sports Association that serves one of the largest slums in Africa. It was nominated for the world's ultimate humanitarian honor in 2003.

In Sierra Leone, Laureus has used sports to return child soldiers from war lords to society. In South Africa, it has used sports to bring orphans off the street.

"We've affected -- what? -- 750,000 kids around the world," Moses figured.

He hasn't done it alone while hop skipping the globe. He's enlisted the help of other athletes to trot around the globe to different projects including former stars like the sprinter Michael Johnson, John McEnroe, Dan Marino, Jack Nicklaus and Martina Navratilova, and current stars like Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal and a host of men and women from European sports like soccer and cricket.

Moses has always been a leader despite making his mark in a sport for individuals rather than teams. He led the fight in the early '80s against the hypocritical prohibition in track and field against athletes earning money from competitions and endorsements. They were being paid under the table anyway, which threatened their eligibility but allowed them to make livings. Then in 1983 he became one of the first athletes in any sport to speak out against steroids abuse, citing the deleterious effects on the body and the dark cloud it would leave over the sport.

This week he's back in the United States working on a program to fight obesity among our youth, a disease that affects everything from their ability to learn to life expectancy. His work is just hard to find between all the news of what seems like a revolving door of justice these days that so many athletes seem to go through.

"I think that's the problem with the focus of the news on sports," Moses said. "It's easy and quite simple and quite titillating to report on the salacious personal habits and goings on of sports people. On many occasions you hear the debate in terms of what athletes are supposed to do, and that athletes are selfish and greedy. But in fairness, the balance is never reported on.

"If stories like ours [Laureus] don't get reported on," Moses said of his new unbroken do-good streak, "people simply won't know about it."

And this deserves as much attention as anything this champion has accomplished.