I remember standing on a medal podium at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, imbued with a sense that if you won enough basketball games, there was no such thing as poor, backward, country, female, or inferior.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I've always seen the Olympics as a place where you could act out your differences on the athletic field with a sense of sportsmanship and fairness and mutual respect.
Going back in time, the best sportsmen ever have been Olympians.
Outside the Olympics, there are massive discrepancies within all sports. But the positive side for me is that the Olympics are the biggest platform there is, and there's total equality across all sports.
We live in a world where sports have the potential to bridge the gap between racism, sexism and discrimination. The 2012 Olympic Games was a great start but hopefully what these games taught us is that if women are given an opportunity on an equal playing field the possibilities for women are endless.
In the '80 Olympics... people expected me to win. I was good enough to win, and I made a mistake and ended up second, which is pretty good, too.
The greatest memory for me of the 1984 Olympics was not the individual honors, but standing on the podium with my teammates to receive our team gold medal.
I saw what politics did to the Olympic Games in 1980 and 1984, and I would defend the right of a sportsman to go and play and perform where they want.
The Olympics were produced absolutely the same way from 1960 through 1988. It was always the Western World against the Eastern Bloc. You didn't even have to spend one second developing the character of any of the Eastern Bloc athletes. It was just good guys and bad guys.
The Olympics: not one of my better memories.
Everything about the Olympics was first class, and women were treated as athletes and equals.