DENVER – By the time the news filtered to him, Edwin Moses had already left a promising engineering job to focus on a full-time career on the track.
The star hurdler was lucky. He already had an Olympic gold medal hanging on his wall.
Hundreds of other American athletes would never get their chance.
They were part of the United States’ 1980 Olympic team – the one that never made it to the Moscow Games after President Jimmy Carter spearheaded an unprecedented move to boycott the Olympics, a choice that became infamous.
The full board of the U.S. Olympic Committee rubber-stamped Carter’s decision 40 years ago Sunday: April 12, 1980.