Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.

We used to have a lot of fun. We never had any problems. We always ate. The fact that we didn't have steak? Who had steak?

Life doesn't give you all the practice races you need.

The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself - the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us - that's where it's at.

To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten. The first 'second' is when you come out of the blocks. The next is when you look up and take your first few strides to attain gain position. By that time the race is actually about half over. The final 'second' - the longest slice of time in the world for an athlete - is that last half of the race, when you really bear down and see what you're made of. It seems to take an eternity, yet is all over before you can think what's happening.

Although I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.

It was bad enough to have toppled from the Olympic heights to make my living competing with animals. But the competition wasn't even fair. No man could beat a race horse, not even for 100 yards.