Gold Medal Physics, with Edwin Moses

What does it take to be the greatest of all time? Can you use physics to win gold? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice investigate with Edwin Moses, two-time Olympic gold medalist and the greatest hurdler of all time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition, and we're going to title this episode "It Ain't Rocket Science." Who do I have with me? Of course, Gary O'Reilly. Gary.

• 0:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey, Neil.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Former professional soccer player in the UK. What team did you play with?

• 0:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Tottenham, Crystal Palace, and Brighton and Hove Albion, all Premier League teams right now, so good news.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay, so you got traded a lot.

• 0:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, yes.

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that mean everyone wanted you? Or does that mean no one wanted you? Which does that mean?

• 0:48Gary O'Reilly?

  All of the above.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So former pro turned sports commentator, and we're lucky to have you. Thanks for being on, of course, as always. And Chuck.

• 0:59Chuck Nice?

  Hey, buddy.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you doing, man?

• 1:01Chuck Nice?

  I'm doing well, man.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, long time StarTalk co-host and comedian and, dare I say, actor.

• 1:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Damn, damn.

• 1:09Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, you would be daring to say that.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got some gigs coming up. Well, maybe we'll do a whole episode on where that's going. So always good to have you guys. Today, we're going to take a look at the upcoming Olympics, Olympics 2021. Of course, they were canceled, postponed out of 2020 due to the pandemic wisely. So, and so I just got a sense of what it means to compete at that level, what people did to enhance their performance to get to these levels. And we've got a former Olympian, Edwin Moses. Edwin, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good morning. Glad to be on. Thank you.

• 1:52Chuck Nice?

  I know, man. It's like, this is crazy. This is insane. And not only, not only, um, Olympic gold medalist, not only the greatest herder of all time, but then...

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. He's not a herder. He's a hurdler.

• 2:08Chuck Nice?

  That's what I said.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get all the syllables in there. You said hurdler. He's a sheep herder, yes.

• 2:15Chuck Nice?

  And no, here's what people don't even know.

• 2:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, you never know. Olympics is getting every sport. Every sport. Sheep herding might be an Olympic sport one day.

• 2:23Chuck Nice?

  And if it ever is, or ever was, Edwin would have a medal in it, so.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Well, let me let me flesh this out. Arguably, in fact, not even just are the greatest 400 meter hurdler of all time, two time Olympic gold medalist, 1976. You surely would have won one in 1980, but we boycotted the Moscow Olympics in the middle in Cold War, you know, and then came back and then did it again in 1984. So that's spanning eight years, which is extraordinary, especially for that event. And you're an emeritus chairman of the board of the United States Anti-Doping Agency. So we're going to spend a whole segment on that. Yeah, that's kind of dope. Yeah, okay.

• 3:08Gary O'Reilly?

  You couldn't resist it, could you?

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a low end Chuck joke, okay? What can we do? You know, sometimes they're just hanging, you got to do. You're chair of the Laureate World Sports Academy. So, so let's just, let's just resurrect some of this, this, this time of you as a hurdler. You had a unique approach to the sport, to the, to your steps, to your, to the, just tell us what made your performance unique. And, and my father used to run track and he described to me what I was looking at, because I'm old enough to remember all this. He described what I was looking at when I saw you in the 1976 and 1984 Olympics. But I want you to tell everybody this. Okay, go.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Well, the story starts that I was a pretty much of a nerd in high school. I studied.

• 3:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, yes.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  I was a nerd. I was a straight out nerd. I, in fact, they, they could have had me playing the character of Urkel, because that's how I presented myself. I was smaller than everyone else. I was pretty good in track, but I wasn't a superstar, was unrecruitable going into, into college. I couldn't get the scholarship. So I got an academic scholarship to go to Morehouse to study engineering. I was in a dual degree program, so I majored in physics and engineering. Wow. At Morehouse, there was no track, no field. So I had to really look at everything differently when it came to being able to train every day. So I used to have to jump fences. We used to carpool to three or four tracks. I ran hurdles in the hallway.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  I had a hurdle that I jumped in the hallway in the winter time. Just, um, I, I was absolutely the most unlikely person to, three years after going to Morehouse with no track, no field, jumping over fences to become Olympic champion. So I had to reinvent everything. And I started by really just technically with the hurdles and also using, using the science to really, you know, take a couple of meters off of the track without anybody else knowing it. So it was a combination of sheer will, going to the right school at the right time, you know, being at an HBCU. I went when I was 17 years old, but being an.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Starkly black colleges and universities, yeah, HBCU.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, where I was able to thrive and, and, uh, study. And the academics was hard. So I was, uh, I didn't have time for frats and parties and girls. I was physics and track and field. So that's where, that's where I put my.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So could it be, uh, you know, I, I'm thinking of, of Bobby Fisher in this example where he didn't have the traditional path of chess training that so many other grandmasters and masters did. So he had to be sort of inventive all on his own. And then when he burst out onto the world scene, no one knew how to handle him. Or is it the fact that you had to invent this on your own, um, contribute to your unique running style when you finally ended up competing?

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, when I was, uh, I think a sophomore or junior in high school, they had an event, you probably have heard of it, the four by 120, 480 yard shuttle hurdle relay where each team, uh, is running 10 hurdles, but one runs up the track and one runs down. And I jumped in as a substitute and really taught myself how to run hurdles. So that was how I started. And I think Tommy Smith, John Carlos, the 1968 Olympics, I was 13 years old, just getting ready to go to high school.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sprinters who, who.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  So that had a big impact on my whole outlook going in. And then the 72 Olympics, which is, it was a debacle for the United States. But in the 72 Olympics, there was a guy by the name of John Aki Bor from Uganda. Smashed the world record and ran forty seven point eight two seconds from lane one. And I imagined myself being John Akibor every time I went out onto the track. I had no idea that four years later, I would go to the Olympics, win the, win the gold medal and break his record. But that's, that was my, uh, my take on track.

• 7:02Gary O'Reilly?

  But let's take a, literally take a step back. You must have had a smart idea about the biometrics. Because of your physics background, you'd have an engineering, you'd have dismantled the whole event and then rebuilt it in your style, in your form that gave you, surely, did you have an unfair advantage is what I'm asking, I suppose?

• 7:24Chuck Nice?

  We need to add more physics because people will have an advantage.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:27Chuck Nice?

  No, it's called a fair advantage. That's what it is.

• 7:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  I, um, I taught myself to run, well, thirteen hurdles. I was a very good high hurdler. I was running like thirteen six and, uh, I dropped my four hundred flat down. So just to, just to be clear, that would be the hundred and ten meter high. A hundred and ten, yeah. Yeah. I went one ten. And then I ran from, from my sophomore year to my junior year. I won the conference in forty seven five and I felt like I had made it in track and field. Well, at the first meet of my junior year, which was seventy six at the Florida relays, uh, I started the season with a forty six one. So that was like a second and a half, uh, a drop right from the beginning. And then when I ran the four hundred hurdles for the first time, I had been doing a lot of power running, cross country running. So I was in tip top condition.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  All I had to do was teach myself how to run the hurdles thirty five meters apart. And the first time I did it, I found myself running thirteen. I found myself using my left leg, which is the inner leg, which. Thirteen strides between. Thirteen steps, yeah. Yeah. Running closer to the curve. And then I figured out that if I run eight inches away from the inner line, which is where they measure the lane versus, uh, you know, two or three feet in the middle of the lane, I'm saving three to four meters per race, which is like fifteen feet, anywhere from twelve to fifteen feet. So that was the first adjustment I made. Wait, wait, wait. Edwin, are you saying that the effective length?

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of your path because you start out in blocks, right?

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course you have to stay in your lane because that you were hurdle all the way around. So the length, the actual 400 meters is not the center line of the width of your lane?

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Eight inches, eight inches from the inner line.

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know that.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Eight inches from the inner line. So my endeavor was to run as close to the inner line as I could. Whereas most people just run all over the lane. And by doing that, I calculated the radius of the track and figured it out that I was saving three to four meters per race. So that's 12 15 feet. And I was, I was basically.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that, that, that, that's an unfair advantage. That's a huge, that's a huge distance. That's a unfair advantage there. That is amazing. But Edwin, that's not nice.

• 9:47Speaker 03

  So everyone was always asking me what the secret was, but I would never talk about something as simple as that. They thought it was, you know.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why would, why would you talk about?

• 9:57Speaker 03

  But it was a combination of 13 steps. I was a very good technician. I ran with my inner leg. My left leg was the one that I went over the hurdle first. So I was able to run closer to the line, which got me 12 to 15 feet in every race. And that was the first thing on my mind coming out of the blocks. If you ever see me come out of the blocks, I'm running almost on the line around those turns.

• 10:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. If you take 13 steps, that's an odd number of steps.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying your left leg only took you over the first hurdle, but your right leg is going to take you over the second one?

• 10:28Speaker 03

  No, left leg every time. Because they don't count the step where you touch down, they don't count that one. They count the following one. So.

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  An odd, an odd number of steps will, will have you hurdling on the same leg. An even number, you would switch.

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You switch. Wow.

• 10:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Anyone wonder why he was world champion?

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So what you're saying is, wait, wait. So if you go over with your left leg. Yeah. And since we all run counterclockwise around the tracks, that left leg assures you that you will be closer to the line, eight inches. Every, every time, every time. Landing somewhere else.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my.

• 11:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Love this. You gotta love this.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  And if you run with your right leg, for example, uh, your body has to remain within the vertical plane of 48 inches. The lanes are 48 inches wide. So if your knee. Swings outside of the lane, technically you can get eliminated from the race. It's a foul and they will call it in the Olympic Games because there's guys who who run with their right leg going over first and their left leg is what they call hooking, going outside of the lane or even under the plane of the hurdle.

• 11:33Chuck Nice?

  Speaking of that, speaking of fouls.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what you're saying, your knee, just, just, just, your, your front leg goes straight out and over and then your trailing leg, it's your knee pulls over. So there's a whole drag motion there that, that has width to it and that's what you're describing.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's exiting the lane.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Ooh, that's right. And if it exits the lane, that can be a penalty. But if your left leg, you don't have to worry about it and you're running inside.

• 11:59Chuck Nice?

  Right. So let me ask you this, um, and I, I will show my ignorance because I've always been, uh, just too afraid to ask this question. When you see the guys running and they're knocking over all the hurdles, are they being, are they being penalized for that? Because every time I watch hurdlers and I see them knocking over the hurdles, I'm like, well, that guy sucks. I could do that. He's just knocking stuff over.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Well, the federation, the federation did a trick on that because when I was running, I think it took 18 to 20 pounds to tip over a high, a high hurdle. It would take 20 pounds of force to knock it over. They reduced that to 12. So, uh, during Roger Kingdom's era, and he won two gold medals, those guys were knocking over hurdles every time. In my era, they had big lead weights on it. One was flipped forward and one was flipped back.

• 12:55Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  If you hit any hurdle, it would, it would take away from you.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, it had to go there. He's saying, in my day, it snowed in both directions and I, we had it hard.

• 13:07Chuck Nice?

  But, but I get it. I get it.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  They had to change the rules to keep up with the old dogs. That's what they did.

• 13:14Chuck Nice?

  There you go. So basically.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  Essentially, that's what they did. And with the track surfaces as well, they changed the, the bouncy, the elasticity of the track to make times faster.

• 13:25Gary O'Reilly?

  So how did you cope with that? Because you went from what I would call cinder track. To, uh, we call it tartan. It's a very smart tartan track. Yeah. And that obviously energy rebounds back out of that. So you being the engineer, how did you cope with the effect that that had in your technique? Cause you always say about the most important thing being the takeoff.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that must have.

• 13:47Chuck Nice?

  Before you, before you do that, maybe there's somebody listening who's like me, who is not a track aficionado like you three and doesn't, and doesn't know what a cinder track and a tartan is.

• 13:57Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, cool.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Rubber track. The, the tracks you see now, the rubberized surfaces. That's, that's what he means. It's a trade name. There's about three different names. Uh, Mondo, tartan, uh, record tan. There's quite a few brand names, but they're all essentially rubber and they all have a standardized, uh, compound that they must have. I ran on dirt tracks in Dayton, Ohio. It was cinder. Basically it was.

• 14:22Chuck Nice?

  Here it is again. I was on dirt tracks and I'm pearls wouldn't.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  It was ground up cinders and, and sand. And they would take, uh, they would spike it up and get a tractor to roll it down. So it's almost like, uh, like you would see on a, at a construction site, right? Before they begin to put up everything. It's just rolled, flattened, heavy. And we used to wear these long three quarter inch spikes in it. The problem with that is when you're behind, you literally eat dirt. The people in front of you are kicking up dust and sand and you know, it gets in your teeth and in your eyes. The first time I ran on a rubberized track with, with great shoes was in the 1976 Olympic Games. I had Adidas.

• 15:00Gary O'Reilly?

  First time you ran on that, on one of those tracks?

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Well, the first time I ran where I really, really felt the difference. When I got brand new shoes that were made by Adidas and they were custom made for the Olympic Games and the Olympic track, which was a lot bigger and just perfect for running. I felt like I, I just felt like a Ferrari and, uh, with big wheels on it. The, the total amount of grip that you could get, the elasticity when you take off. I mean, you could feel the energy coming out of the track if you put it in. So when I felt that in Montreal, ran around that track, I just knew it was going to be all over. And the spikes are shorter for the, for the rubberized track, correct? Yeah. They're, they're like, mine were like nine millimeters, something like that, like a quarter of an inch, less than a half of an inch. Right, right. Yeah. I knew.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Once those shoes were on my feet, it was all over as far as I was concerned.

• 15:51Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  See, see.

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's confidence right there.

• 15:56Chuck Nice?

  This is, this is where being disadvantaged becomes the ultimate advantage. Because when you have all the accoutrement and they're just giving you all the, the latest and the best, you're like, okay, I'm spoiled. But when you don't have any of that and then you get it, it's like, oh my God, now this is an elevation. Like, I'm sure right now, there's a brother somewhere in Africa that's skiing on dirt. And when, and when he gets to snow, it's gonna be over.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  That's right. This is true.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Edwin, you, I'm, I'm a fan of dance and I learned that you took ballet classes. Was this specifically to, to work, to help you work on your hurdling or had some other just general interest?

• 16:40Speaker 03

  My roommate at Morehouse, Josiah Young, Dr. Josiah Young now, he was, I guess, one of the first male principal dancers at the Atlanta Ballet. When we were in college, he was that good. He had been taking it all of his life. He would come out to the track and watch and I would watch him compose dances and stretch and flexibility. So I learned a tremendous amount about flexibility from him. And I actually took one class over at Spelman in ballet and dance. He drug me over there because he, there was not too many guys that wanted to take it. But I went over and took it because I was interested in, in the flexibility and the stretching part of it. So I learned a lot about, and hurdles and ballet are very, very similar.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  I, I consider myself more of an artist and artisan when it comes to technically running the hurdles, but using the scientific background and being in tip-top condition, having the cardiovascular training, being a very, very good sprinter, everything.

• 17:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it sounds like you had combined mind, body, soul into one sort of holistic package.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that a fair way to think about this?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  I would say so because the thing that I didn't have was a track, which is the main requirement for track appeal. So I had to, I had to think of everything, flexibility, diet. Yeah, I, I had to use every advantage and everything I could think of because just as today, where you see basketball Jones, that's what they call them, walking around with a basketball and their baggy shorts and a couple of pairs of shoes in the bag. I was walking around with track shoes and thinking about running all day long.

• 18:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we got to take a break. So when we come back, Edwin, I want to get into what your role has been in the sort of anti doping movement with regard to the purity and the efficacy of sports. That's so stay with us on StarTalk Sports.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. We're here with Edwin Moses, Olympic great from a period where I was, you know, first really getting into the Olympics back in the 1970s because that's how old I am. 1976 and 1984 gold medalist, 400 meter hurdles. And, and, and something I want to pick up in that first segment. Edwin, you, you won how many consecutive races?

• 19:23Speaker 03

  At the end of my career was 122 straight races. And 100, 107 of those were finals, 107, but it was 122.

• 19:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn. So why does anyone even bother to say, here, just take the medal. I'll go to, I'll meet you at the bar. Right. If everyone knows you're going to win, what, do other, do other runners believe that they might be able to beat you in that one time? Do they think so?

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Every time I ran. In someone else's mind, they were in an Olympic final and I knew that every step of the way. And a lot of people thought that me winning was easy, but running faster, probably running more than the other athletes, I had to be prepared all the time. And the faster you run, the more it hurts. So I was the one that was in pain all the time, but I was always ready for that.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was across almost 10 years. How many times did you break your own record in those 122 wins?

• 20:24Speaker 03

  1976, I broke the world record in the Olympic Games. That year, I was breaking my own personal record all the way up until the Olympic Games, until my personal record became the world record.

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  It's hard. It's hard. It sounds, it sounds easy at that time. Once you become a world record holder, I mean, it becomes hard to break your personal record. You might only get two or three chances a year if you run 20. That everything can go right.

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, do you need someone on your shoulder to try to, to push you?

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Well, that's what I didn't have. That's the one thing I didn't have. I was

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I'm so fast. Nobody was ever near me.

• 21:04Chuck Nice?

  Hey, yeah. And by the way, Dr. Moses, I just need to correct you on one thing. You said it sounds easy. No, it doesn't. It's not.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  It looked, it looked easy. When you see it on television, it looked like I was just prancing away, but I had to run hard every time.

• 21:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You look like you were just floating and

• 21:25Speaker 03

  You have to run hard to maintain 13, especially at the end. So I, I had like a zone where I could run 13 steps slowly and run maybe a 48.3, 48.5. And if I ran fast, then I could run as, as far as, as fast as I did down to 47 flat. So there's like a second range and your times are generally going to be in there whether you run fast or slow. It's just a matter of intensity during the race.

• 21:52Gary O'Reilly?

  You have an internal stopwatch, don't you?

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Amazing.

• 21:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, uh, did you, given that you could have made this calculation, I'm wondering if you did, this, there's a calculation between how much time you spend airborne versus how much time, so in other words, the arc of every stride. The higher you go, the more time you're wasting coming back to earth before your foot hits the ground again. Is there some ideal elevation? Airborne elevation above the track that maximizes your forward motion?

• 22:24Chuck Nice?

  And can I add to that and say, and is there anything that in that what Neil just said that changes the gate itself?

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's really the key. Those two questions are really the key because there's only one perfect takeoff point for the hurdle. There's only one point and you might, I may be, for me, it's about nine to 12 feet away from the hurdle that I'm taking off. And for me, what I did was, I never thought that I was going up into the air and going over an object. I thought I was, really, I called it an exaggerated step. And all I did, and because I was flexible, I was just able to take off at the right point, begin my movement, get my lead leg up, just the hurdle's three feet high, so maybe three feet and two or three inches.

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute, Edwin, wait, wait, wait, wait. Did you just tell me that your launch point to jump over hurdle is up to nine feet?

• 23:18Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before the hurdle?

• 23:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And did you notice that he just said that? He just casually, right? Like, oh yeah, everybody, everybody just, everybody could just put their leg up 12 feet away from something and just end up on the other side of it. And by the way.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Like four feet on the other side.

• 23:36Chuck Nice?

  Four feet on the other, so you were, so basically you were Jordan before Jordan. That's basically.

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  I used to kick basketball rims when I was at that age, when I was running. Go up, kick it with my foot and come down like a cat. I can, I can jump. I could have played basketball, but I really loved track. But basically, I also, another thing.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, you could have slammed dust with your feet.

• 23:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Horrible, like 2,400 back then. It's like 2,600. So 35 meters, I can't even see the hurdle in front of me. So I had to concentrate on the one takeoff point for everything and then count the number of steps and then wait for the hurdle to come in. But I never really focused visually on the hurdle. This will be interesting to you, Neil. I always, you know, you're a running platform and everything is moving, your mind is working, but I saw myself as, as the stationary object.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  And I saw the hurdle was something that was moving at me. And most runners, they say, okay, I'm moving. There's the object out there. I'm running it out. But I saw myself as a stationary object. My whole mental frame of mind was the hurdle is gonna get to where I want it to be. All I have to do is take off when I get there. Versus trying to aim at a spot this 12 or 15 feet in front of a hurdle.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is, this is called a Galilean transformation.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  I transformed everything.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are stationary. The track is moving under your feet. That there it is.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I wore contact lenses and glasses. And if it was raining or they fogged up, then I was in trouble. So I had to look at it from a completely different way. That with the stretching, the diet. And I trained hard. I outtrained everyone. And I'd like to say that I, I became better than people that were much, much better than me. Because I, I stayed in it longer and just became better than them. Outworked them.

• 25:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, hmm, hmm. Okay, so now tell me about, at the time and even continuing decades to follow, there's always been rumors of doping. In one way or another, doping is, I guess, the broad category of what anyone would do to themselves chemically, usually to the blood, to enhance their performance. So in your later years, in your, I guess, in retirement, you've become a big anti-doping advocate. So could you just describe what your motivations were there and why it brings you back?

• 25:58Speaker 03

  It happened at the 76 Olympic Games, which was my first one. I was 20 years old. And from my perspective, here I am, I'm the best 400 meter hurdler in the world. I'm running it under 48 seconds. And I see these women from Romania and East Germany and Bulgaria and Russians, and they have more muscles than me. And I was like, what the hell? You know, looking at them in the bill, it's the swimmers, the track and field people, not to mention the discus and hammer, but all of the runners. If you go back and look at any book that had the 76 Olympic sprints, 100, 200, 400, 800, 1500, it was dominated by East Bloc women. And that really bothered me. One reason was because I came from, from an atmosphere where I didn't even have a track.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  So for me to take drugs and think about cheating was really beyond comprehension. And during that time, to be honest with you, most of the cheating was done in the East Bloc. There were a few athletes in the United States, but most of those were like the discos, hammer throwers, the weight guys.

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The strength, the, yeah, the, the strength sports, yeah.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, the extreme sports. And so as my career progressed after 1980, it really changed in the United States as we led towards the 1984 Olympic Games. Cause it was money on the table for marketing and.

• 27:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was Los Angeles, right, LA.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  Coaches out there that were willing to show athletes what to do. And I began to fight it, quite frankly, back in the seventies and it was an uphill battle. I was one of the few athletes that was not afraid to say anything because we were kind of like, sort of like our code of honor that they have amongst, say, policemen, for example, was that kind of scenario.

• 27:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it, is it right, doctor, that you, you received death threats because of the actions that you took to change the sport and keep it clean?

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, all kinds of threats, yeah.

• 27:48Chuck Nice?

  So wait, these guys were doping, right? And you're still beating them. You're, you're natural a hundred percent, you're clean. They're hopped up on whatever andro, whatever they got in them. And you're still winning. Which is why if you look very closely at the 76 race that you took the world record, there's one dude in the back giving you a finger the entire way around the track.

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I missed that, Chuck.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that on YouTube?

• 28:21Chuck Nice?

  I just watched it on YouTube.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, wait, wait. So, so Edmund, the, you famously lost some race to some guy in Germany. And then a week later beat him by 15 meters, right? And this is like widely talked about. So was he doped up when he beat you? Or would someone accuse you of doping up in order to beat him right one week later?

• 28:46Speaker 03

  No, I think he was, he was one of my competitors that I ran against many, many times. He was my arch rival, Harold Smith from Germany. And he was clean his whole career. He worked hard too. And we both started in the 76 games and we both finished in the 1988 game. So our career.

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how, so how, how could he, how did he beat you?

• 29:06Speaker 03

  I was, to be honest with you, I was staying at a, a, uh, at a guest house of a guy who owned a Mercedes dealership in Berlin and myself and the guy named Maxi Parks. We were out at the pool sipping martinis and we should have been warming up. So when we got out to the track, I just got out there late. It was my second or third race ever in Europe and I just wasn't paying attention, wasn't paying attention. I clipped, I clipped the hurdle. I clipped the ninth hurdle and he passed me and then I lunged at the wrong finish line and you know, it was too late to beat him. And at that point, it really didn't matter. There was no winning streak or anything like that.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Yeah. Didn't break a winning streak and you, and you kicked ass a week later just to.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  It angered me.

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that was very Michael Jordan to be motivated to say.

• 29:51Gary O'Reilly?

  And there's Neil, Neil, there's a little phrase in there.

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 29:56Gary O'Reilly?

  It angered me. You see, when you, when, when you, when you hear an athlete say that and then you look at the history of what that triggered, you realize how condensed that power was and that how that was brought forward. So that for me is a very powerful short sentence. It angered me.

• 30:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this thing about doping, over the years, it gets more and more sophisticated. Yes. In part to, to dodge loopholes, which I guess you just have to plug the loopholes, but also even if there's no loophole, they do it so that they don't get caught. So how do you approach this? How can you expect to be effective if this is like whack a mole? You know, every next drug that gets developed, somebody does something different.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Well, there's a couple of different approaches now. There's a deterrence model that they set up, which does statistical analysis and kind of bases certain events, whether it's biathlon or bobsled or track and field on probabilities of athletes needing to take drugs and being in that type of event, when the competitions are, what countries they come from, what part of the training cycle that they're in. We also have new tools out there. One is what they call a non-analytical positive. The computer power, Neil, has really helped in the fight against doping because most people think of drug testing as like a litmus test. You, you have urine and then. You know, you can test for a lot of things like the opioids, cocaine, steroids,

• 31:22Speaker 03

  stimulants, things of that nature. And those are pretty much the same with the GCMS. But then we also have a lot of other. I guess no one tests for marijuana because then you're just too chilled. They're trying to minimize that because around the world in some places it's legal. And you're dealing with a pool of athletes where it's quite likely that they would use it. I still know that marijuana ever helped anyone do any sport at all. It can't help in some sports, but basically it clogs up the legal system in terms of dealing with positive tests. And that's what they don't want to have. They actually raised the limits a couple of years ago, and I think they've almost decriminalized it in sport, except for in competition now.

• 32:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Dr. Moses, there's something selective androgen receptor modulators.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  That's just what I was going to talk to you about.

• 32:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Then I'll step aside, sir.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  They are not anabolic steroids, but they are precursors or they stimulate the production of anabolic steroids or some kind of hormones in your body. Most of them are research drugs. There's a bunch of doctors from around the world that get these drugs from laboratories in China or from a lab under the auspices of doing research and they convert these drugs and take them and package them up. But they make your body produce more of the type of hormones and not, not all of it is just straight testosterone. Androstein diol is an idio calanolone is about five or six different drugs that they know are part of the reason that the body does overproduction and stimulates muscle

• 32:53Speaker 03

  growth. But the research now, what did I say, non analytical positive tests, they're looking now, they're looking at proteins on a steroid chain and they're looking at like 200, 300 different strands of DNA that they know will change. And they know there's nothing your body can do about it to reverse it. So now they're looking at, you know, the DNA strands on protein chains. And now they're able to go up to an athlete and say, oh, you're 6'9", 290 pounds and throw in a javelin 300 feet. How can you have breast cancer and be pregnant? You know, it's that sophisticated. And that actually is what's happening. Women who present as though they have testicular cancer, for example.

• 33:35Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  So it's very, very sophisticated now.

• 33:38Chuck Nice?

  And those markers are there because they're an imprint of the doping that they have done. These small molecule things that they've put in their body, that's the imprint that they made.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  The effect is immediate. It may not be an imprint that it makes on the body, but it causes something else to happen that can be measured.

• 33:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. And that something else is not necessarily revealed in a blood test, but you do get genetically out of it.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  Right. So they call those non-analytical positives. We don't even detect a drug. We just know that this can't be possible.

• 34:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Some of these research drugs, are they sort of gene therapy? And is this where we are?

• 34:16Speaker 03

  They're moving into that too. Some of them are.

• 34:18Gary O'Reilly?

  But how do we detect that?

• 34:19Speaker 03

  We go right to the manufacturers of some of these drugs in the pharmaceutical houses and make agreements with them such that we see the research way in advance and we're able to figure out when we see it, we recognize it. That's what they're doing now.

• 34:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, you're ahead of the story.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot of detection out there. And we have agents, we have guys from the DEA and FBI and Interpol that run security offices that do investigations. We have a bunch of whistleblowers all over the world, so there's a lot of different elements. It's not just urine and blood anymore. There's very sophisticated intelligence that goes on.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta take a break, but can you hang out for our third segment? Because we want to just sort of shoot the shit and just sort of speak in a completely disorganized way on topics that didn't cleanly fit into the two previous segments with your permission, if you can hang on. When we come back, more StarTalk Sports Edition with Olympic great Evan Martin.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. It's not rocket science with Edward Moses, Olympic great in the 1970s and 80s for the 400-meter hurdles. And a few things, Edwin. I've always known, as I said, my father ran track and he told me about it and I ran with him a few times. The 400-meter race, with or without hurdles, I think everyone agrees is the hardest race in all track and field. And would you, because it's too long to sprint the whole way, but it's not so long that you could pace yourself. So is this, is this a fair commentary on it?

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Very fair. The only other race that I'd say would be equal is the 800 meters, 800 meters, the way that they're running that now because they're running like 141 and 142.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's become, the 800 meters has worked its way into that machine.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  In 800 meters, you don't have to lift your leg and go over something and then come down and sprint and then make it to the next hurdle and then go over something.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no 800-meter hurdle, is what you're saying, right?

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Yep. So it's the tough, they call it the man-killer event.

• 36:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I just want to go a little further back on your story again. So you had a chemistry set as a kid, you were a geek kid. You know, the word today would be blurred, black nerd, right?

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the term for that. So tell me some other geeky things that you did. Your father was a Tuskegee airmen, is that right?

• 37:07Speaker 03

  My dad was a Tuskegee airmen. He studied botany and biochemistry at Kentucky State. He wanted to be a doctor, but he could never get into medical school back during those days in the early 50s. He tried Indiana University, a bunch of schools, and he was very frustrated. He went into education. But I grew up looking at my dad's chemistry books, organic chemistry books. I didn't know what I was looking at, but I was just turning pages and fascinated. Algebra and geometry books. We had a whole basement full of his college books.

• 37:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, today, many people sell back their books or they just, you know, the idea that a book is something ephemeral is so anathema to me that I'm glad that you're... You benefited from kept books.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  We had the children's encyclopedia. We had the Encyclopedia Britannica. I've done everything from making a volcano with potassium chloride or whatever it is and blowing it up in school. I had a big hill. I have fossil collection, insect collection, frogs and snakes. I had butterfly collections, launch model rockets, had a chemistry set and a biology set. So I was just a total nerd after my dad.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, I'm so loving this.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was. And I had braces and big Coke bottle glasses. So I used to have to fight a lot. I would get bullied. You really were uncle. I had to fight. My house was uphill. So after, I used to get out of school early and leave like five minutes before and start running uphill with my saxophone, but I never got caught. So that's one of the reasons I was able to get in shape. Cause I wasn't afraid to run uphill to get.

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's before bullies were outlawed. You know, bullies are like a whole thing today. You know, they're sent to the principal or kicked out of school. And back in our day, they were just a fundamental part of life in high school. And in fact, you know, people forget that the movie Back to the Future, that whole storyline exists only because there's a bully. Just think of, just think about how that is and what that works. Today, that would be not, that wouldn't be tolerated from an administrative level, even if it was, you know, the terror of the kids in the school. So you had all this kind of backdrop and I'm just loving, I love hearing it. Let me ask you, you approach the whole sport holistically as we've described,

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  or just as one generalized package, rather than send out Interpol to catch cheaters, is there a way, and I don't want to sound all new agey on you, but is there a way to just change the culture of high performance athletics so that?

• 39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one would even think to do such a thing. Yes, yes, Dr. Moses. Can you please change human nature?

• 39:55Speaker 03

  Well, I was, I was the chairman, interestingly enough.

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, he might have a solution, Chuck. He just might.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  I was the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency's Education Committee, and we realigned the education to really, even at a young age, as early as like three, four, five years old, to really kind of integrate ethics and fair play in sports at an age-appropriate level. If you're seven years old, or 12, or 15. For example, if a kid, if you put together a group of nursery school kids, and you let them run across the room, 20 meters or something, you go ahead and put one kid in front of the others and watch the other ones go off. They know innately what's cheating and what's fair and what's not fair. And so when you begin to talk to them at that appropriate level,

• 40:42Speaker 03

  why it's important to play by the rules, understand the rules, be a gracious loser.

• 40:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that example, you gave an obvious advantage to another student.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  That's right. They know that right off the bat. So when you can engage them at age-appropriate levels with those principles, then you can begin to deter the use of steroids. And then you have to talk about the risks. There's risks and rewards that athletes are willing to take in order to become a world-class champion, become an Olympic champion.

• 41:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean health risks or penalization risks?

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Penalization risks.

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  And physical risks, as well as physical risks.

• 41:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think you should talk about physical risks because

• 41:22Speaker 03

  As physical risks.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there might be some future doping thing that has no other side effects. And so to say, "Don't do this because you'll lose your testicles" or whatever,

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  is that the only reason why? No, you don't want them to do it because it would give them an unfair advantage. The rest of that is just a byproduct.

• 41:40Gary O'Reilly?

  So, okay, okay, Dr. Moses. Your athletic career is nothing short of stellar. The campaign and your advocacy for a clean sport is amazing, but do you not regret having passed a cognitive test to be an astronaut? Not to have gone to space.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, the story is I got drafted in nineteen seventy five. Passed the test for uh to go become a Navy bomber navigator. And uh the war was still going on. I think I was a junior sophomore junior at at Morehouse Steel and the recruiter came by. He was from the Marine Corps. He said, well, it's another one of my uh physicist partners. We both got drafted on the same day. Our numbers came up, so we were definitely going to Vietnam. And he said, I give you guys a choice. We said, what's that? He said, you can go to Vietnam with an M sixteen on your back or F sixteen. We said, we'll take the F.

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  F sixteen.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  And we were supposed to go down to Pensacola, me to train to become a bomber navigator. My vision was not good enough for a pilot, but um and then that was actually gonna be the path to becoming an astronaut for me because there there was no black astronauts back then. And they were recruiting us because we were physicists and engineers. So I had that path and was very interested in it. And then the next year I went to the Olympic Games and all bets were off.

• 43:02Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 43:04Gary O'Reilly?

  What a surprise.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was.

• 43:06Chuck Nice?

  Unfortunately, I cannot run to the moon, so I'll be here, guys. I'll settle for the Olympics.

• 43:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, Dr. Moses, looking forward and hopefully in twenty twenty one and Tokyo, what are we going to get on top of sport and make it clean? Or are we going to rinse and repeat the episodes of previous Olympians?

• 43:33Speaker 03

  Well, generally Olympic sport is clean. There's just uh there's a few bad players that promote the use of drugs and

• 43:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Russia.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  write prescriptions and it's all over the world and all different sports, including here in the U S. Majority of athletes wanna be clean. And because of the work that we've done at USADA, they trust us to do what's necessary to keep the playing field level for everyone. If athletes test positive, we have to do something about it. So they have the confidence that there is someone there that's gonna keep the playing field level. And that's been the greatest thing, one of the greatest uh pieces of work that we've done and we've actually been able to. Kind of clean the playing field up and make it level and have the athletes think that there are no exceptions, whether you're a Lance Armstrong or whoever else you may be, that there's no exceptions, that we in the United States, we go after anyone, including

• 44:24Speaker 03

  the eighty-five-year-old little old lady who's, you know, a cyclist on weekends and, you know, there's so many different athletes that test positive. And there's a lot that make innocent mistakes, especially with supplements or. Did you just say this in eighty? I'm sorry.

• 44:41Chuck Nice?

  Get over here, Grandma. We don't give a damn.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  The heartbreaking thing is inadvertent use, like a substance that's in a. Ingeritol. An eighty-five-year-old lady with muscles, busting function people out. Yep, supplements, you know, supplements that retain it, those are the heartbreaking cases, or someone who just missed tests, you know, they're a knucklehead and they just miss a couple of tests every now and then, you only get three, those are the heartbreaking tests. The majority of people want to compete clean.

• 45:14Chuck Nice?

  So can I ask you, I'm gonna ask you a philosophical question, because as we talk about this, so, you know, people take these things when they're cheating for the promotion of anabolism and then also for recovery time.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:29Chuck Nice?

  So let's say, for instance, you had a drug that did not promote the growth aspect, but did decrease recovery time.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Improved healing.

• 45:42Chuck Nice?

  Would that, yeah, that improved your healing, would that be okay if something like that were, or is philosophically, it's just the whole act of utilizing a substance that is the problem, period?

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Well, in cycling, they use corticosteroids, they're mostly used for recovery, to help the body recover, because if you look at the Tour de France, there's no way that you can pedal like that or do any high-intensity sport for eighteen, twenty days in a row without a lot of physical damage, and eventually your body's gonna break down. So all those recovery drugs that are pharmaceuticals, that aren't normal, a normal person would take just to feel good, those are all banned, those are all banned. There's certain ways that you can take them, injections in a joint, for example, but you can't inject them into your skin, can't rub them onto your skin, just like you can't do testosterone and whatnot. So I use ICE, that was the best recovery method.

• 46:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ice Bath.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  And when I was doing it back in the late seventies and early eighties, everyone laughed at me. But now every NBA soccer team, NFL, baseball, you see their guys in ice immediately after the game. Yeah, but wait a minute. Because that's more than almost any other, any other.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  H two O.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  I was the first to do that. They laughed at me back then.

• 46:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  H two O is a major additive.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Fifty degrees, twenty minutes.

• 47:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great.

• 47:03Gary O'Reilly?

  So you were, I mean, apart, apart from being this holistic athlete and the yoga, the stretching, the diet, you embrace technology. You, you, you were one of the first people to have one of those.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  Heartbeat monitors.

• 47:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, the Finnish company Polar.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Polar.

• 47:21Gary O'Reilly?

  When was that, that you started to take that sort of tech onto the track and use it?

• 47:25Speaker 03

  That was seventy eight. I went to, I went to Finland to run about three track meets and met this Finnish masseur, Ilpo Nikila, who stayed with me for almost my whole career. And they showed me the monitor. And then one year I got injured and went up and trained in a place called Verimaki, the Finnish training center for six weeks. And they gave me a new one and I just found a way to incorporate that into my training because I knew how far I was going. I measured everything off my cross-country courses around the track. And I used it to be able to moderate how much time I would use between races. And I've still got all the charts, the original charts. And then I plotted it on the old Epson QX ten,

• 48:07Speaker 03

  which had about twenty discs to load up just to be able to count to five. But, but I, I saved all that and printed it all out.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man. You've got a museum there. So Edwin, when is, when is the biopic coming out?

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Um, actually, we're working on it right now.

• 48:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, is it?

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Right now, we have a, we have a treatment. I don't know which way it's gonna go, but we actually are working on it right now.

• 48:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it based on a book or is it, is it just something out of, just going straight to film? And who do you want to play young Edwin Moses?

• 48:42Speaker 03

  I don't know if it's gonna be that kind of movie. It really just depends on how it's marketed and who picks it up. But I do see scenes in my imagination. I see scenes of me asking the teacher to, can I, can I go to the bathroom? Running to my locker, getting my clothes, grabbing my saxophone and busting out the door uphill with the kids chasing me. I see that, you know, at night as a part of the movie.

• 49:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me channel some of my father's spirit energy here. We lost him a couple of years ago. Just that it's an honor to have you on the show to talk with you about what you did in that race that all of us were agape at as we saw you win with such grace and such poison. It's great to see that you've continued. It's great to learn that you're blurred from way back. And if we may, when the Olympics comes a little closer, if you're not heavily tapped by all the Olympic outlets, can we bring you back on and just shoot the shit about the Olympics? Absolutely. Because you know, Olympics is the way the world comes together, just to think about the sports that keeps us together, really, at some level. So it'd be great to have you

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  back on when that time comes. All right, we gotta, we gotta call it quits there. Sorry, sorry Edwin, we gotta run. Yeah.

• 49:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're done with the talk no more.

• 50:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna run, we gotta hurdle out of here. Also, plus, it's pretty clear that Edwin was destined to greatness because the dude's name is Moses, okay? Yeah. There you go. Deliver us from the desert, Edwin. So anyhow, we'll call it quits there. So Chuck, good to have you. Gary. Always a pleasure. Pleasure, pleasure. Dr. Edwin Moses, it's been an honor. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.