It dawned on me with blinding brightness. I realized: I had jumped into another rare kind of stratosphere - one that only a handful of people in every generation are lucky enough to know.

I always loved running.... It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power.

People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.

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.

A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.

After I came home from the 1936 Olympics with my four medals, it became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, want to shake my hand or have me up to their suite. But no one was going to offer me a job.

The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.