I had already been into my professional career for six years and had not won an individual gold medal at the Olympics. There was a tremendous amount of pressure going into 1996 to get it done.

One of the main techniques I used was focusing on the goal and visualising myself competing in the race before the race started.

You can't control what the other athlete is going to do; you can't control anything except for your competition and how you execute the race or how you execute the task.

Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me - I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.

Sport is a great way to keep fit. It's a stress reliever.

We're not women - we're playing football.

My high school didn't have a football team; we just had like a surf team, because I grew up in Encinitas, California, which is the ultimate place where everyone skated or surfed, so it was a very different culture. It was, like, cool to be the art kid.

Some of the authorities would like to remove rhythmic gymnastics from the list of Olympic sports and turn it into art. I think this would be wrong, as rhythmic gymnastics is a true sport - we train around six hours per day and sometimes spend entire days in the gym.