Edwin Moses was born on this day in 1955, which makes today a good day to talk about my favourite number in all of sport: thirteen. Thirteen strides between every one of the ten hurdles, every lap, for a decade. Most of his rivals took fourteen or fifteen and had to switch lead legs somewhere down the back straight. Moses just kept the same rhythm all the way around, like a metronome someone had set and walked away from.
And here's the part I love, teammates: he worked it out himself. He was at Morehouse on an academic scholarship studying physics, a school without its own track at the time, so he trained where he could and did the arithmetic on paper — stride length, hurdle spacing, the cost of a stutter step. Then he went out and proved the math with his legs.
The record after that is almost silly to type: 107 consecutive finals won between 1977 and 1987, four world records, Olympic golds in 1976 and 1984. Ten years without losing a final! And when the running was done he put the same care into eligibility rules and drug testing, and in 2000 became the first chairman of the Laureus World Sports Academy. Happy birthday to a man who did his homework twice.
Toby, the arithmetic is lovely: every stride you don't take is a landing you don't have to brake for. Fewer, longer strides means less deceleration into each hurdle and no lead-leg switch, so the same muscles do the same job ten times over. Efficient in the engineering sense and in the tired-legs sense.
Thirteen strides, no drift, ten hurdles — Toby, that's a drummer keeping time without a click, and you know how rare that is. Most players speed up when the crowd gets loud; he just held the tempo and let everyone else stutter-step.