I was fifteen years old when I watched Edwin Moses become an Olympic champion in the 400 metres hurdles, breaking both the Olympic and world records with a time of 47.63 seconds. After those 1976 Montreal Olympics, I followed his progress from afar as he re-wrote the record books in a fashion that no-one would ever match, going on to win 122 straight races over a ten-year period. Such athletic feats are rare and require remarkable dedication. As he told me, the training all came down to bursts of a few seconds every few days as he moved from one athletics meeting to the next.
But Edwin Moses is more than an athlete, he’s a real ambassador for a remarkable country: talking to him at a reception hosted by BP at the British Embassy in Washington last night he answered my questions about track and his favourite races – he’d probably been asked the very same things countless times before, but he didn’t let that show. In fact, he got really animated when talking about the up and coming stars that we’d see in London, such as Usain Bolt and Jessica Ennis, and he expressed how pleased he was that they were attracting global audiences to come and enjoy sport. He even made me stop and think when talking about how the US has welcomed people from virtually every nation on earth and offered them US citizenship; how proud he was that the US Olympic team that will be boarding planes in the next few weeks in search of glory that will be truly multicultural.
There is a lesson in that for everyone.
With just one month to go until the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Edwin Moses is a real life, world-class role model that we will be honoured to have commenting in London during London 2012.