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.
The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
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.
It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close.
The secret is, first, get a thoroughbred horse because they are the most nervous animals on earth. Then get the biggest gun you can find and make sure the starter fires that big gun right by the nervous thoroughbred’s ear.
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.
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?
When I came back, after all those stories about Hitler and his snub, I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now what’s the difference?
Life doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.
For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.
The lives of most men are patchwork quilts. Or at best one matching outfit with a closet and laundry bag full of incongruous accumulations. A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
I’d noticed him watching me for a year or so, especially when we’d play games where there was running or jumping.
I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals.
I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.
To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.
It’s like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it.
When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.
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.
Every morning, just like in Alabama, I got up with the sun, ate my breakfast even before my mother and sisters and brothers, and went to school, winter, spring, and fall alike to run and jump and bend my body this way and that for Mr. Charles Riley.