Olympic great Moses not sure Tokyo will be safe
Hunkered down in Georgia, certain his tomato plants will reach for the sun as the invisible fog of coronavirus begins to recede, Edwin Moses feels blessed. Tilling the red clay of a vegetable garden, Moses is safe at home, a 64-year-old legend filled with gratitude for health as solid as Olympic gold.
The greatest hurdler who ever lived wants for nothing … except for toilet paper, which hoarders can’t keep their grubby mitts off.
“I used to spin that toilet paper roll like a roulette wheel. Now, I spin it like I’m cracking a safe,” Moses told me, as laughter shook his chest, with a happy reminder the best thing that can be transmitted from one person to the next is a smile.
It’s a grateful smile that warms a great champion’s heart, where Moses closely guards a cherished story of a loved one who was swallowed by the coronavirus but managed to escape.
In a time when sports have been sidelined by COVID-19, I wanted to chat about how Moses dealt with the 1980 Summer Olympic boycott, which robbed him of near-certain victory at a time he was unbeatable in the 400 meter hurdles, a race he won an incredible 122 consecutive times during a full decade of dominance that left world-class competitors awestruck in his dust.
“I was devastated,” recalled Moses, rubbing emotional scars that remain four decades after being used by President Jimmy Carter as a political pawn in the Cold War against Russia.
So Moses offered sincere empathy for superstar gymnast Simone Biles and every other current U.S. Olympian, all now in limbo, hopeful but unsure if the virus-postponed Summer Games in Tokyo will indeed take place in 2021. Yet I detected something else, something bigger and more important than an Olympic dream deferred, was tugging in the shadows of the old hurdler’s mind.
“I have a very close family member that came down with (coronavirus),” said Moses, wrestling with whether he should share details of a deeply personal tale. “I’ll tell you, because I think it’s important to know. It’s my son. He’s a professional volleyball player in
Spain.”
Playing sports is often a hard road for the son of a legend, because inevitable comparisons prove nearly impossible to shake. Julian Moses made a name for himself in the volleyball arena, not a track stadium, at Lewis University in Illinois, then traveled last autumn to join a club team on Ibiza, an idyllic island in the Mediterranean Sea.
Feeling ill shortly after the holidays with a cough and sore throat, Julian was “one of the first victims,” Moses confided, as I hung on every word a concerned father spoke into the phone. “He got tested and came up positive.”
COVID-19, which has ravaged Spain with nearly 14,000 deaths, will not steal Julian from those who love a 24-year-old athlete with a full life ahead of him. He fully recovered while in quarantine under the care of his mother, a resident of Germany.
“We got him out of Spain just in the nick of time. I said: ‘We have to get you out of there. Period.’ That’s the best decision we made,” Moses said. “He was one of the lucky ones.”
Failure has never been an option for Moses. Refusing to be beaten by the 1980 boycott, he returned to win the second Olympic gold of a brilliant career at the Summer Games in
Los Angeles four years later. So he’s uniquely qualified to understand the stress currently felt by Biles, whose precise mental and physical preparation for Tokyo must now be re-engineered after coronavirus wrecked all our plans for 2020.
“For (Biles) to wait another year is going to be a challenge. As athletes know, stuff happens during the course of a year. You can get injured. … And she’s got a lot riding financially on the Olympic Games,” said Moses, who regularly travels the globe, consulting with the brightest researchers in sports medicine, as chairperson of the U.S. AntiDoping Agency.
When I sought reassurance we will return to normalcy and the Summer Games will lift the world’s spirits during rescheduled dates in Japan next year, Moses raised a stern hand of caution. A pandemic can spread and flare like wildfire, and Moses isn’t certain the coronavirus will be sufficiently contained to allow more than 11,000 athletes to converge safely in Tokyo in 2021.
“Um, we will see. … I’m waiting for more data,” said Moses, refusing to presume the Olympics can safely be held before we know when an effective antidote or vaccine against COVID-19 will be widely available.
Like the Cold War, a stubborn insistence Olympic competition unsoiled by drug cheats and every challenge great or small that Moses has confronted during his lifetime, he believes America can get to the other side of this pandemic stronger, provided everyone in the country realizes what’s at stake in the fight against coronavirus.
“If you believe it’s not going to bother you, or you’re going to be saved at the end of the day by some force you believe in … there could be surprises,” Moses said. “If not surprises for you, someone very close to you, will probably get it and have a very difficult time.”
The sight of empty shelves in the grocery, where the toilet paper we took for granted has vanished, gives Moses reason to chuckle at the absurdity of our oh-so-human condition. But the coronavirus, stealthy and quick enough to tackle the son of an Olympic legend, is deadly serious, a foe so malicious it can be beaten only by science and vigilance.
“It’s no joke,” Moses warned. “It’s no joke.”