“A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.”
And
“Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.”
And
“I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.”
And
“I always loved running – it was something you could do by yourself and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.”
And
“If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard. The thrill of competing carries with it the thrill of a gold medal. One wants to win to prove himself the best.”
And
“One chance is all you need.”
And
“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.”
And
“We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.”
And
“I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn’t in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I’d learned long ago from Charles Riley, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.”
And
“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.”
And
“I fought, I fought harder . . . but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.” –on almost not qualifying for the Olympic finals in long jump
And
“I decided I wasn’t going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.” –on his final leap in long-jump competition, a record-breaking 26 feet, 5 and 5/16 inches
And
“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.”
–on his Olympic achievements
Wikipedia: Jesse Owens
