R.I.P. Greg Foster

I think a WC Gold and an Olympic are equal accomplishments but in different years.

I didn’t mean this as an insult.

But he truly would have god-like status if he shifted each of those Golds one year later.

Roger Kingdom has two Golds but is more well known because he got them in 1984 and 1988.

I was at some of those meets. There was incredible anticipation of the hurdles race every time. The promoters put together great cards and attempted to hype other races but all anybody was talking about was Nehemiah vs. Foster.

In particular I remember one year they split the two Los Angeles races, with Nehemiah winning handily indoors at Sunkist then Foster turning the tables at Pepsi a few months later. I was at both races. The weather was as different as the results. Cold wasn't unexpected in February but I remember climbing a hill to seek shade at the Pepsi meet at UCLA. Hazy day and brutally hot.

Frankly I wasn't happy when Foster won that day. As a reporter for the Daily Trojan I had tried to set up an interview with him a couple of weeks earlier. The sports information director said Foster declined. That was very unusual. All the other UCLA stars of that era like Kenny Easley and Karch Kiraly and Freeman McNeil agreed to it, and it always was set up through the Bruin SID office. Heck, Karch gave me his number and said to call him if I had any more questions. He grabbed my notebook one time after a match and diagrammed the differences between the 5-1 and 6-2 offenses, after I asked a technical question about one play.

Foster always seemed like he had a chip on his shoulder, while Nehemiah came across as the suave smiling media friendly guy who would lance you with his performances. Those two races I described must have been 1981 or 1982. Probably 1981, if I had to guess. It seemed like Nehemiah/Foster was just getting started and would certainly be the feature leading into Los Angeles 1984, along with Carl Lewis.

As a result I never really cared about Roger Kingdom. That's unfair to him but I still viewed it as semi-watching those races but mostly getting them out of the way because it was supposed to be Nehemiah vs. Foster anyway.

At USC we had an excellent sprint hurdler named Tonie Campbell who was always so frustrated during the early '80s that he couldn't drop that extra couple of tenths to be competitive with Nehemiah or Foster. Then he ended up with as many Olympic hurdling medals as the two of them combined.

I'm glad to see the pictures of Foster smiling, and the reports in this thread that he was a great guy. I've always maintained the image of the snarling guy behind the glasses who didn't agree to that interview.

The US hurdling crew in the late 80s/early 90s....man what a great group of guys. I had the chance to be around Kingdom when he was working out in Pittsburgh and know Tonie Campbell while living in San Diego. Everyone speaks highly of Foster too. Those are real role models. Not the tools who played in that NBA all-start game last night. They just went about their business and did things the right way. No need to clap white powder in the air before a race to get everyone's attention.

My impression is similar, though only due to seeing him race in Toronto in the early 80's a couple of times. He never looked very happy, but I just watched his win in 1991 and the joy at the end has totally changed my impression of him.

The good truly do die young.

What did the NBA do to you?

His career was definitely overshowed Skeets partially because of perception. Not that Skeets was not a nice person, but Foster was a much nicer. Skeets at times carried himself like a star. And, when Foster was winning in the early 80s, he suffered from the perception that it was becasue Skeets was playing football.

Of course this is nonsense. Many good people die young and many do not.

Greg was never quite to the level of Nehemiah, but he outlasted him and had the greater overall track career obviously. Skeets did have more of an ego- the problem was that he was too confident of his athletic ability and how it could translate to the NFL. One of the WORST athletic decisions of all time when Skeets signed with the 49ers. Foster took advantage and good for him. RIP Greg. Good memories of these 2 legends.

No relation. Greg Foster Jr. is a freshman at Princeton. He's run 8.06 this winter but his main events are the horizontal jumps. He had legal 25-6 ¼ and 51-0 ¾ last spring as a high school senior. His father, also Greg Foster, competed in the 1988 Trials in Indianapolis in the triple jump but never hurdled.

That is a reply to this:

everyone ignoring the fact that he deliberately reached out and pulled down his rival mark mccoy in the 1987 world indoor championships.

blatant cheating and it is laughable how the us commentators ignore it.