At 1984 Olympics, Edwin Moses led athletes out of the amateur era

Six years, 11 months and eight days.

That’s how long it had been since Edwin Moses had lost a 400-meter hurdles race entering his first day of competition at the 1984 Summer Olympics. He would have to defend that streak in front of a home crowd in Los Angeles, creating adversity that would seem excruciating.

But Moses had bigger worries.

“There wasn’t so much pressure on the track,” Moses said. “For me, the pressure was, economically, what’s going to happen to the sport? What am I going to be able to draw out of the sport while I’m still competing? And I was the point person for that.”

Moses was at the forefront of many major reforms in international athletics – including changes to the amateurism model of the Olympics.

“(Moses) was the guy who really pushed for athletes to get paid,” said Sports Illustrated’s Jon Wertheim, author of “Glory Days: The Summer of 1984 and the 90 Days that Changed Sports and Culture Forever.” “The professionalism that you saw creep in (during) ‘84 … he was really the driving force of that.”

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In the years following his first Olympic gold in 1976, Moses began campaigning for more transparent, viable payment structures in sports. At the time, elite American track athletes could only take money under the table for fear of losing their Olympic opportunity.

“We had absolutely no support versus what was happening in the communist countries,” Moses said. “We were just free particles running around Europe.”

Moses said he “brought everyone to the table” to discuss the issue of amateurism. By 1981, the International Olympic Committee ushered in rules changes deemphasizing amateurism in the Olympic charter, a move that set the table for an explosion of sponsorship deals in Los Angeles.

“The (1984) Olympics was the first time the whole sports world got to see what a corporate model looked like,” Moses said. “That was the first real sponsorship-driven, television-driven event ever in the world.”

But while Moses spent much of his time focused on the future of the sport, he still had a race to win. In the Olympic final in L.A., he proved he could handle hurdles on the track just as well as he had off it, seizing the lead early and never relinquishing it.

Moses ultimately won 122 consecutive races over nine years, nine months and nine days. He finally lost in 1987 and took bronze in the 1988 Olympics, his last race. His greatness on the track is undeniable.

So, too, is his impact on the future of the Olympics.

“(The athletes today) can be thankful to the efforts that we started making in the ‘70s,” Moses said, “to change the rules in ‘80, to have the Olympics in ‘84 and for that to continue on.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: At 1984 Olympics, Edwin Moses led athletes out of the amateur era