At the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Benita Fitzgerald Mosley won the gold medal in the 100-meter hurdles by 4/100th of a second over the favorite, Shirley Strong from Great Britain.
Olympic gold medalist and visionary executive Benita Fitzgerald Mosley says it has been her lifelong mission to help people win gold medals in business—and in life.
“My gold medal is the gift that keeps on giving,” Fitzgerald Mosley says. “I am forever grateful, so I want to pay that gift forward.”
To get there, Fitzgerald Mosley highlights five “Olympic rings” to help people achieve their goals: Have a good start, set high goals, run your own race, power through hurdles and have a strong finish.
“You have to ask yourself, why not me?’’ Fitzgerald Mosley says. “Why can’t I be the best in the world at what I do?”
From becoming the first African American woman to win the 100-meter hurdles at the 1984 Olympics to her current role as chief executive officer of Multiplying Good, Fitzgerald Mosley has persistently broken barriers and advanced the idea that sport has the power to inspire and change the world.
Her enormous impact as a results-oriented leader in the Olympic, non-profit, and corporate worlds is why Dean Jeremy Jordan asked Fitzgerald Mosley to be the keynote speaker at the Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics Convocation at 12:30 p.m. May 10 in the John A. Lally Athletics Complex.
“Benita’s ‘why not me?’ message encourages us to challenge societal expectations and embrace our potential, while Multiplying Good is helping people bring about positive change and inspiring them to do more,” Jordan says. “The life lessons and insights that Benita will share May 10 will provide valuable inspiration to our graduates and all of us.”
Using Fitzgerald Mosley’s five Olympic rings, here is her remarkable story:
Fitzgerald Mosley often uses a quote from former American politician and motivational speaker Les Brown, who said, “You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.”
After trying gymnastics and softball, Fitzgerald Mosley started running track in the seventh grade and soon became a star hurdler.
Fitzgerald Mosley’s parents, Fannie and Rodger Fitzgerald, were both educators and they encouraged Fitzgerald Mosley to get started in as many extracurricular activities as possible in their hometown of Dale City, Virginia. By participating in gymnastics, softball, majorettes and track, and learning the piano, violin, flute and piccolo, Fitzgerald Mosley discovered what she loved and was good at and where to focus her attention.
“They were very supportive and stood by me in every aspect of my life,” Fitzgerald Mosley says of her parents. “They celebrated my every achievement, large and small, and I loved to make them proud.”
While she became the first chair flute for the Gar-Field High School symphonic band, Fitzgerald Mosley says she wasn’t very good at softball and grew too tall to be a gymnast. But middle school physical education teacher, family friend and gymnastics coach Gwen Washington was also the coach of the track team and when it became obvious that Fitzgerald Mosley had outgrown gymnastics, Washington suggested she join the track team because she had seen Fitzgerald Mosley outrun the boys in gym classes.
“So I went out for the track team and started winning races from the very beginning,” Fitzgerald Mosley says. “It wasn’t until I was 12 years old and in the seventh grade that I even discovered my athletic prowess.”
As a high school freshman sprinter and hurdler, Fitzgerald Mosley helped the track team win its fourth consecutive Virginia state championship. She was a teammate of senior Paula Girven, who represented the United States in the high jump in the 1976 Olympics and qualified for the team in 1980. Their high school track coach, Anne Locket, also led the girl’s gymnastics and basketball teams to state championships.
During a visit to Falk College in early April, Benita Fitzgerald Mosley met with students to share her experiences in the sport industry.
“Coach Locket said to me, ‘You know, you can be an Olympian someday just like Paula,’ and I looked at her like she was from Mars,” Fitzgerald Mosley says, smiling. “But having a coach believe in you and say that to a youngster at 14 years old, it set me up for great things to come.”
By 1980, Fitzgerald Mosley was 18 and already a track star—and an industrial engineering major—at the University of Tennessee, where she would become a 14-time All-American and four-time NCAA hurdles champion. Like Girven, she made the 1980 Olympic team but didn’t participate because the United States led a boycott of the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Fortunately for Fitzgerald Mosley, she was still in college and had the benefit of having access to coaching, training equipment and the highest level of competition in college. This was a time when Olympic athletes were strictly amateurs who couldn’t make money off their athletic achievements, and many athletes who qualified for the 1980 Games, like Girven, weren’t able to return for the 1984 Games.
“At that point, people didn’t have these long careers spanning three and four and five Olympic Games that started with my generation because they started to allow us to make money while we were competing,” Fitzgerald Mosley says. “The two other hurdlers that were on the Olympic team with me in 1980 didn’t make it again in 1984, so that was their one and only chance to be an Olympian.”
For the complete story, please visit the Falk College website.
