"When I look back at this thing, I’m just going to think, ‘Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and I’m going to mourn the loss of my father-in-law. We can do that. We can be happy and feel a tinge of sadness, as well."
Men’s volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon, after leading the men’s volleyball team in the 2008 Olympics to it’s first gold since 1984 just days after his father-in-law was attacked and killed at a tourist spot while in Beijing for the Olympics.
In full view of the Fuhrer, a nineteen year old German athlete gave Jesse Owens some advice – ‘play it safe, make your mark several inches before the takeoff board and jump from there.’ Owens, the grandson of a slave and the son of a sharecropper took the advice, qualified for the finals and took his tally of gold medals to four. The first to congratulate him was Luz Long. “It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler… You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn’t be a plating on the twenty-four carat friendship that I felt for Luz Long at that moment,” he said, recounting his rendezvous with the blue eyed German but for all his heroics, Jesse had to take the freight elevator in the Waldorf Astoria to attend his own reception.
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"My country did not send me 5000 miles to start the race. They sent me 5000 miles to finish the race."
Tanzanian runner, John Stephen Akhwari, when interviewed after finishing the marathon an hour after the gold was won, carrying a dislocated knee across the finish line, and asked why he did not quit
