Edwin Moses ran 26,000 miles in 20 years on his way to winning two Olympic gold medals and 122 consecutive races in the 400-meter hurdles.

"Enough to go around the world," he muses.

Frank Niemeir/AJC

Olympic hurdling legend Edwin Moses looks comfortable last week at Atlanta's Morehouse College, where the track is named after him.

Associated Press/1984 (ENLARGE)

In one of the countless Kodak moments of his storied career, Edwin Moses flies toward a first-place finish 24 years ago in Los Angeles.

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The Atlanta resident still spans the globe — though not in track shoes — as chairman of the Laureus World Sports Academy, an international organization that uses sport as an instrument for social change. The job can take him to 20 or more countries a year and lead to some exotic experiences.

One day he's walking through mine fields in Cambodia, another he's sitting next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a dinner in St. Petersburg.

His workouts are now confined to calisthentics and stretching exercises, owing to a longstanding back injury and a competitive nature that won't let him take a purely recreational run.

And yet, there are times like the day last week when he visited his old school, Morehouse, and showed awed members of the college's track and field team the technique that made him a legend. Slim and supple at 52, a powerful package of sinew, grit and smarts, Edwin Moses can still take the hurdles in stride.

"I can get up and do them in the middle of the night," he says laughing. "That's my gift. That's what I do."

Moses has done a lot more than jump a hurdle here or there since he left competitive athletics two decades ago. The short version of his professional resume could make Abraham Lincoln (merely a farmer, lawyer and politician) envious: Physicist, engineer, investment banker, business executive, social activist and sportsman are some of the roles he's played.

"Never in a million years," he says, "would I have expected these things to happen to me."

He hopes to share the details of his life soon in an autobiography – he's got a 500-page transcript – although, pointing to his passion for food, he says, "I really want to do a cookbook."

Smart money suggests Emeril and Rachael Ray take heed.

Moses' varied background serves him well at Laureus, which was founded in 1999 to celebrate achievement in sports but also to fund social projects around the world using sports involvement as a means to improve the lives of people in need. Moses joined Laureus in 2000 and soon took over its leadership.

Typical of the projects Laureus has funded is Midnight Basketball in Richmond, Va. Youths there participate in a night-into-early-morning basketball tournament that keeps them off the streets and requires them to participate in education and self-improvement programs.

Elsewhere, a soccer school in South Africa is used to teach children about the effects of drug and alcohol abuse and the dangers of HIV/AIDS. In France, outdoor physical activity helps handicapped people better integrate into the community and overcome their disabilities. In Uruguay, the goal is reducing school absenteeism, delinquency and drug abuse.

Teaching participants how to play sports better is not the point of the programs, Moses said. But sometimes sports is the only way to entice people to attend a program that can help them in important ways.

As chairman, Moses has overseen funding of 60 such projects in 28 countries. His job, and that of his staff, is to find small but promising programs around the world that need financing to expand and become more successful. Laureus' budget, funded largely by corporate donors, has risen to $5 million, and Moses said projects generally receive from $50,000 to $150,000 each annually.

He estimates 175,000 children have benefited from projects funded by Laureus.

"I couldn't think of a better job to have," he said. "Because it's all good news. Everything we do is good for someone."

When he's not traveling for Laureus or visiting his 12-year-old son in California, where he has a home, Moses is in Atlanta, where he moved in 1994 after taking a job as a financial consultant. He settled here in part because of the access it gives him to his family in Ohio, where he grew up, and to many of the countries to which he travels.

Being in Atlanta also allows him to visit Morehouse and to see the Edwin C. Moses Track at B.T. Harvey Stadium.

Back when he was in college, there was no Edwin C. Moses Track; there wasn't a track at all. Times have changed, and now everyone at the school seems to know one of the greatest athletes of all time, even those too young to have watched him win gold in Montreal in 1976 and in Los Angeles in 1984, or bronze in Seoul in 1988; even those too young to have followed his pioneering work in mandatory drug testing and in developing an equitable pay system for amateur athletes.

Christopher Greene knows. A College Park sophomore and triple jumper at Morehouse, Greene and other track team members got to hear Moses during his visit last week.

"Edwin C. Moses — when that name comes to mind, all I think about is greatness," Greene said afterward. "The struggles he went through coming from a school that didn't even have a track to becoming a world class athlete. You can't come to Morehouse and not know who Edwin Moses is. He's one of a kind."

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