So my story is about Olympic races but also about a life race and I have had so many challenges. When I was born, the growth was stunted in my right leg. My thigh is only about this long, and so the doctors recommended when I was five that they amputate my foot.

And I remember being in the hospital so many years ago. Children's hospitals were not pretty and brightly colored places they are now. It was a dim, gray building, but it was the Shriners Hospital, and I got all my work for free, which was great, because my mom could not have afforded it. But I remember, praise God, being in that hospital and going down that corridor into the double operating doors and pulling up, and they put you on this ice-cold table, and I thought, "I'll never go to sleep now."

But they do. They knock you out, and it's as if only a split second passed, and I remember waking up and feeling the bandages where my foot used to be, so they cut off my leg, but then I had to learn how to walk all over again. And I remember a therapy I had to do where they put down a pile of telephone books and put a bathroom scale on the top, and I had to push with the end of my stump on that scale. And there was a nurse who would sit next to me and read the numbers on the scale, and she would say, "Bonnie, five pounds is not enough. You're gonna have to push harder. You're gonna have to push harder."

And it hurt so much, the tears were running down my face. I hated her. [Laughter] When I look back, though, I realize how much she loved me. I don't know that I would have the strength to sit with a five-year-old girl who just got her leg cut off and push her and push her to pain and tears to make her strong. Is that what God does for us? How many times have we been pushed into tears and into pain to get to a better place to make us strong.

Other kids can run and play on the playground. Why do I have to suffer so much just to learn how to walk? It ain't fair. But we get pushed and made strong. I remember on Sunday mornings when I was growing up before church my brother and sister and I would get up in our pajamas, and we would get outta bed and run down to my mother's room and jump in her bed. And we would start a pillow fight, and we'd be wrestling and laughing, and eventually my mother would calm us down and say, "It's time to start the family counsel meeting."

And we had this hardback red book with blank pages in it, and each one of us kids would take turns each week taking the minutes for the meeting, and whoever's turn it was would write agenda on the top and the date and numbers down the side and say, "Does anybody have anything to bring up?" And inevitably one of us kids would say, "I have something bring up, last night's dinner." [Makes gagging noise] We thought that was funny week after week after week, cuz we were just kids goofing around, but my mother was a single mom and a schoolteacher trying to raise three kids and pull us together, and we used those family counsel meetings to keep our family on track, to pull us together.

You know we were the kind of family that didn't have money at the money. We had month at the end of the money. [Laughter] You know what I mean? So we always had a little bit of a struggle, but we had books. Somebody asked me the other day, "Were you wealthy when you grew up?" And I said, "We had books in every room." We were wealthy, because we had knowledge. We had education. We had faith. We had hope. We had dreams that life could be better, and in that hardback red book. I looked back after I grew up, and I looked back at that book once, and you know every week there were the usual nagging mother things like ya know you're not taking out the trash. You're not doing your chores. You gotta do this. You gotta do that.

But there was also things that we needed as individuals. Like my brother ran track, so if he needed new shoes or he needed a ride out to a meet somewhere that was all noted down so that we could all get what we needed. There were also things about trying to cooperate better like people were using so many towels. We had so much laundry. Somebody said, "You know what. If we would assign a colored towel to each person, you could hang onto your towel just a little longer, and we could save some work, you know. So we would come up with creative ideas to work together as a team. We would solve the needs of individuals, and that was how we worked as a team to pull it together and make it work.

Now I remember one week I brought up that I had landed the lead role in a play at the girl's club. I was gonna be Cinderella on Friday, and I needed a dress to go to the ball, so my mother noted that down. She said, "One day after work this week, we'll go out, and we'll find that dress for you." So Monday she had to work late. Tuesday slipped by. Wednesday I think she went grocery shopping. Suddenly, it was Thursday night, and we did not yet have the dress. Now I'm sure none of you would find yourself in this position at the last minute going out and looking for the dress for the play the next day. She had dinner, threw the dishes in the sink, got the three kids loaded in the car, and hit the road. We went to a couple of department stores, but you know formal dresses for a little girl were pretty expensive, and it's just a play, so we finally ended up where we often shopped for clothes, which was The Salvation Army.

And we went all the way in the back, and they have kind of the fancy dresses in the back, and there was a lot of old wedding dresses kinda turning yellow, but then I saw this one dress, and I thought, "I could be Cinderella in that dress." It had green sequins on the bodice and white tulle coming out at the waist, and I looked for the price tag hoping that we could afford it, and I couldn't find the price tag, so my mother took the dress up to the front and put it on the counter and said, "How much is the dress?" And the clerk said, "Well, if it has no price, we have to send it back to the pricing center, get the price, and we'll get it in a couple of days." And my mother explains, "No, no you don't understand. It's late at night. All the stores are closing. We need this dress. She needs to be Cinderella in a play the next day. Can't you just make up a price?"

She said, "Oh no I can't do that." See my mother is an options thinker, right, so my mother suggests a couple of ideas. She said, "Well, why don't you take a price off another dress, put it on this one, and send the other dress back to the pricing center?" "No I can't." "How about if I leave a deposit or some ID, and I rent the dress and bring it back tomorrow, and it'll still be used. You can sell it to somebody else, right?" [Laughter] "No, no, no." At that point, all the frustration my mother had ever experienced. You know all the discrimination she'd ever faced, trying to keep her three kids out of the streets, out of prison, you know, in little plays at the girl's club. All the not being held as a child, you know. Her father left before she was born, you know.

Everything that had ever happened to my mother kind of welled up in her and was aimed at this poor, innocent clerk. [Laughter] The clerk sensed the hostility and took a couple of steps back, and my mother picked up the dress, and she said, "Well I guess if there's no price on it, it must be free." [Laughter] And she walked out the door. Scared the heck out of me. I thought they were gonna take our license plate and call the police. Please don't try this at home. [Laughter] This is like paying the bills thing, right. Please don't try this at home.

My mother was the kind of person, though, that fought like a mother bear for everybody who was trying to do the right thing, and it wasn't just us kids. She was a schoolteacher. She worked her way up. She got her doctorate when I was 12, went back to school, and then she became a principal of many schools, and she fought for the parents of the kids. She fought for the teachers that were working for her. You know when she said, "Our kids," we never knew whether she meant us or the other kids at school, you know. She - and when I'd walk down the street with her.

You know I've been - he listed all the things. I've been on The Today Show, The Montel Williams Show, and everything, but when I walk down the street with her in San Diego, she's the one that gets recognized. There are so many lives she has touched in San Diego and made such a difference that it's like walking around with Ghandi, you know. People just wanna touch the hem of her skirt. They say, "You saved my kid. You got my kid off drugs." You know, she's an amazing person. Amen. Amen. Hallelujah for that. [Applause]

So I grew up going to Sunday school and accepted Christ into my heart, and I went to an Episcopalian school, and I was an alter girl, and I was very strong in reading the Bible. But somehow when I got to be a teenager, I decided God just wasn't doing enough for me, and I said, "I gotta do it my way. I think I can do more. I think I can do more." [Laughter] And you know, I didn't - you don't - God helped me learn to walk. God got all my surgeries for free, you know, but that just wasn't enough. So I had that head-strong teenager thing, and I said, "I'm gonna, I can do better. I need to go out on my own and find my own way. I'm gonna go out in the world and do exciting things."

And I got this skiing idea, and a friend of mine invited me to go skiing with her family over Christmas, and I went and it was hard. I was falling, and I was cold and I was bruised. And it was very, very difficult, but I finally got enough balance and strength to where I could pick up some speed and I could go, and I loved it. I was hooked, cuz it was - you know I had gone from being the crippled kid in school that everybody teased and shy, and I had the glasses, and I had this leg that looked like Pinocchio. I couldn't be in sports, and to be able to be on that snowy hill, flying, being graceful and fast for the first time in my life was an incredible feeling. I was hooked.

So I decided I wanted to be a ski racer, and I found out there was this high school in Vermont for ski racers, and I sent away for the brochure, and I remember sitting on my bed with my brother looking at this brochure, and it showed the kids training on the mountains and doing exercises and going to races, and I thought, "If I could go to that school, I could be a champion." And I looked at my brother, and I looked at the tuition. It was $8,400.00 for the tuition, and it might as well have been a million, cuz we didn't have any money. I looked at my brother and said, "This is impossible, so I might as well get started." [Laughter]

See whether I liked it or not, I had learned a lot about faith, hadn't I? I had learned a lot about things unseen, and so I set about the job of doing it. Another thing my mother had taught me was that everything you need to know is in a book somewhere, and so I went to the library. Gotta be a skier. Went to the library. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? So I went to the library, and I looked up organizations that might support minorities. Organizations that might give me money for sports. Organizations that might give money to women. Organizations that gave money to youth. Anything. And I wrote up a whole proposal about the money I needed to go to Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, and I tell you there weren't any one-legged skiers there, so I didn't mind that that wasn't seen yet either.

And I sent out this proposal to all these organizations, and by the time September rolled around, and it was time for school to start, I had raised a total of $100.00, which was clearly not enough. So I called up the head master Warren Withrow, and he knew I had been trying to raise the money. I had kept him in touch with what I was doing, and I said, "I'm sorry, I failed. I can't come to your school." And he said two words. He said, "Come anyway." I thought, "They must be rich." [Laughter] Just waive all that tuition. So I showed up at the school, and I had to scrape together money just to get the airline ticket over, you know, and do that.

And I got there, and I found out that they were not a rich school. It was 65 kids that attend the school in converted old wood log cabins and farmhouses, and they made another bed out of two by four's and plywood, and they made space on the benches and the dining hall. I could eat and sleep and go to school, and I could be with them. So they believed in my dream and wanted me to go after that. On the first day of school, I broke my leg. My only leg. So now, I told you my leg comes down to here, so on crutches there's nothing real within 12 inches of the ground.

And we were on a mountain in Vermont, okay, so there were no sidewalks to walk on. There were no streetlights at night on the sidewalks that didn't exist, so just to get from where I slept to where I ate in the dark in the cold. We were up there on that mountain practically in Canada, 3,000 feet above sea level. It was cold, and every time, you know, on the crutches with, you know, nothing real on the ground, I would be stumbling. I would fall three times just trying to go to dinner. Never mind trying to get my laundry done, trying to get my homework done. I was crying in my pillow every night when I first got there.

People asked me, "Why didn't you go home?" And I had worked so hard for that dream that I could be a ski champion. I had written all those proposals. I had made phone calls. I had begged. I had worked to - I had done so many odd jobs to try to pull money together to do, and this was my chance to do something great, so I thought the head master might send me home. You know, we gave you full ride here, and you don't have any legs. You don't have a leg to stand on, right. And no. But the head master didn't send me home. I thought my mother would say you gotta go home. But no adult, nobody made me stop. I wasn't gonna make myself stop. So I kept going.

When I got out of that cast, my other leg broke. My artificial leg snapped in half from all the stress. Now there aren't a lot of leg repair shops in Vermont, so we decided the best thing was just to mail it back to the place it was made in Los Angeles. They said they could express mail it in a day. They said they could fix it in a day, and then I would get it back. So three days, four days go by I'm still waiting for my leg. My leg doesn't show up, and I go to the post office, you know, cuz I'm looking for a package about this high. [Laughter] Turns out they accidentally sent it book rate, surface mail. So for three weeks, my leg was roaming the country. Oh man. That was one of the toughest times in my life.

And when I got on the ski hill, I had a whole new set of problems when the snow actually fell and the training started. All the other kids there could ski better on one leg than I could, cuz they'd been skiing since they were two years old up on this mountain, and I only started skiing when I was 15. And I found out that when you cry in your goggles, it freezes on the front. It doesn't do you a lick of good. That was a tough time. It was a tough time. But I finished that year, and I became much stronger from it. I learned how to train like an athlete, how to do sit-ups. I learned how to jump rope, and there was a test there that you had to do where you had to jump 300 times in 90 seconds. And I was able to do that on one leg. I take off my leg when I jump rope, so I just jump on one, and I was so proud I could do that.

So I became much stronger, and that was what gave me the possibility, the chance, of becoming a champion.