A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.

The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us.

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.

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?

I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn't a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.

I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals.

A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.