Nairobi — Most of the sporting heroes of my youth are now dead, and I am glad. I will tell you why later. This month found one of the greatest American athletes of all time, Edwin Moses, in Uganda on a personal pilgrimage.

Ed Moses, now a bespectacled middle-aged gentleman, was realising a long-held dream of visiting the land of the man he dethroned in 1976 without a fight.

So he decided to celebrate his 54th birthday, August 31, in Uganda.

It was at the 1976 Montreal Olympics that Ed Moses broke the 400m hurdles world record that had been set in 1972 at the Munich Olympics by John Akii Bua.

It now transpires that though Ed Moses kept repeatedly breaking his own record in the years after, he still wonders whether he would have emerged the champion in Montreal if Akii Bua, the man he regarded as his inspiration, had been there. He will never know.

Ed Moses is an athletics legend.

He held the Olympics/ world record for the highly technical event of the 400 metres hurdles longer than any other man, and defying age, was still running in 1988, winning bronze in Seoul, Korea.

What makes Moses stand out is that unlike many of his "great" contemporaries, he never used steroids.

He is an activist against drug abuse and for this he has won worldwide acclaim, earning honorary doctorates along the way.

All along, he said while in Kampala, the nagging question has remained on his mind: What would the outcome in Montreal have been if Akii Bua had been running?

The world has now come to accept that Africans will inevitably dominate races where the metres are in four digits and that demand more endurance than technical calculations.

So commentators find it okay for an Ethiopian or Kenyan to win the marathon, the 3,000 metres, the 5,000 metres and so on.

But the sprints and more complicated stuff like hurdles that require more scientific training are expected to fall to the well-facilitated Americans and British.

This is why Ed Moses and the Western athletics world held the young Ugandan policeman who set a new world record in the 400 metres hurdles in 1972 in such high esteem.

Documentaries are still being made on Akii-Bua, the first man to run the event under 48 seconds, having benefited from two years of training with British coach Marcolm Arnold.

Sadly, in 1976, Aki Bua, still barely 25 years old, was not in Montreal to defend his record because of an African boycott of the Games.

We treasure Akii Bua all the more because we have had so few other greats.

A couple of boxers like Ayub Kalule became world professional champions.

Other greats were the late Joseph Masajjage, Cranes goalkeeper in the 1960s, who could see Uganda right through the regional soccer tourney without conceding a single goal.

In the 1990s, the elderly Masajjage went to Nakivubo to see how the boys perform these days.

When he asked at the gate if he could be allowed into the stadium though he did not have any money, they set dogs on him. He never dared return to Nakivubo until he died.

Joe Kadenge -- the Kenyan striker from whom police patrol cars in Uganda got their name -- served in our Express FC for years.

When he returned to Uganda briefly a few years ago to watch a Cranes match against Rwanda in Nambole, he expressed disappointment at the way our boys now believe more in witchcraft than in their coach.

What strikes me today about these great sportsmen of yesteryear is that they came from different tribes.

One of Uganda's best soccer players ever, Phillip Omondi, was actually Kenyan though he chose to become and remain Ugandan as an adult.

We buried him in Nakawa division of Kampala recently. Most of these sportsmen have now passed on.

Because one of sports' most important roles is to promote peace and unity, I am glad most of them have not lived to see the tribal pit morass into which Uganda is sinking today.

And I hope Ed Moses did not stay long enough to realise where our Bafuruki and Banyala mess is leading.