Frank Shorter landing on the cover of the July 5, 1976 issue of Sports Illustrated was perfectly timed — the Montreal Olympics were just weeks away and Shorter was heading back to defend the gold medal he had won in Munich four years earlier in one of the most memorable moments in American track and field history. He had crossed the finish line in Munich in 1972 to a roar from a crowd that had spent the week living through the horror of the Munich massacre — and it was a roar he almost never heard, thanks to an imposter who entered the stadium ahead of him and tried to steal the race and steal his glory. His victory had done something unexpected — it ignited a running boom in America that was still going strong four years later. Now, with Montreal on the horizon, Shorter was the face of American distance running, the defending champion, and the man the entire track world was watching, making him the perfect cover subject for a magazine that understood better than anyone what was at stake when the greatest runners in the world lined up to race 26.2 miles through the streets of a Canadian summer.

He won gold in '72 and silver in '76 — but that silver comes with an asterisk that history has since validated. Shorter always believed something was wrong with the man who beat him, Waldemar Cierpinski of East Germany, who had improved his marathon time by five full minutes in a single year — what Shorter called a "leapfrogger." Years later, after the Berlin Wall came down, documents surfaced showing two members of the East German Stasi corresponding about who was procuring and taking performance enhancing drugs, confirming what Shorter had suspected all along. It didn't give him back the gold medal. But it gave him something else entirely.

It gave him a mission. Shorter got the attention of President Bill Clinton and Senator John McCain, enlisted the support of U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey, and helped found the United States Anti-Doping Agency — an organization he has been fighting for and through for over fifty years. The man who won Munich and was robbed in Montreal became the most important voice in the war for clean sport, and that fight has defined as much of his life as any finish line he ever crossed.

And in a conversation that goes well beyond the track, Frank also shares what it meant to take the experience of being a child abuse victim and turn it into a lifetime of child abuse awareness advocacy — because it turns out the most important race Frank Shorter ever ran had nothing to do with a stopwatch. This is the kind of conversation Past Our Prime was built for. For the second time, the great Frank Shorter joins us on the podcast. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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