For most people, they only thing they know about bobsled is 'Cool Runnings.' Well, 'Cool Runnings' was, of course, four men in a bobsled, and four-man is considered the highlight of our sport. It's what everybody knows. It's what everybody watches. And it's the big dog of our sport.
As an adult, I'm not supposed to go down slides. So if I'm at the top of a slide, I have to pretend that I got there accidentally. "How the hell did I get up here? I guess I have to slide down. Whee!" That's what you say when you're having fun. You refer to yourself and some other people.
We had a dog who was named Pushinka, who was given to my father by a Soviet official. And we trained that dog to slide down the slide we had in the back of the White House. Sliding the dog down that slide is probably my first memory.
My dream was to have a slide bannister so I could slide down and go out the door to work.
As I came down the Highgate Hill, The Highgate Hill, the Highgate Hill, As I came down the Highgate Hill, I met the sun's bravado, And saw below me, fold on fold, Grey to pearl and pearl to gold, This London like a land of old, The land of Eldorado.
When you start your bobsled career at 30, a time when most are settling down into their 'real careers' and many are getting married, you can imagine the barrage of questions and the look of, 'You're doing what?' that you receive.
When me and Mike Tyson were around, we played king of the hill. Whoever comes to the hill, you get your behind whooped. We don't pick and choose. I fought guys when I had fractured wrists and ribs, bad backs, I didn't care. I was the king of the hill; Tyson was king of the hill. When we left, people were trying to get the 'most money fight.'
I don't know if anybody can second-guess what they will do on Capitol Hill.
Bullfighting has some of the elements of a sport or contest, and in the United States most people think of it as a sport, an unfair sport. If you're in Spain or Mexico it's absolutely not a sport; it's not thought of as a sport and it's not written about as a sport. It has elements of public spectacle, but then so does, for example, the Super Bowl. It has elements of a deeply entrenched, deeply conservative tradition, a tradition that resists change, as you pointed out.
Yeah, no one really grows up competing in the bobsled. You have to be 16 years old before you can even drive one. And there are really only two places in the country where you can bobsled - Park City, Utah, and Lake Placid, New York.
I'm just telling you in my universe, people that I know who voted for Donald Trump and want the Trump agenda or most of it, I don't know anybody who is content for nothing to happen, status quo while the Republicans and Trump bicker. I don't know anybody who wants any more of this.
You don't know a ladder has splinters until you slide down it.
It doesn't matter where you come from. Running is a universal sport and universal language.
I think that was the scariest part about bobsled, is when you just don't know what's happening, you don't know where you are on the track, you don't know when it's going to be over, and you don't know what it's supposed to feel like.
Mahomet made the people believe that he would call a hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers for the observers of his law. The people assembled: Mahomet called the hill to come to him again and again; and when the hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said, 'If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.'
The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal... That was something I earned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing... The cure for that is to write the thing down which you will not publish and which you won't show people. To write secretly... so you can actually be free to say anything you want.