When Bruce Jenner won Olympic gold in the 1976 decathalon, there was a person living inside he had never revealed.
The 66-year-old Caitlyn Jenner talks about that time with Sports Illustrated on the same week the 2016 U.S. decathlon team will be chosen.
The score Bruce Jenner got competing in 1976 would still merit a spot on the team today, the SI article states.
The SI issue comes out July 4, marking 40 years since the win.
The transformed Jenner reaches in to a bathroom drawer and flips aside a makeup bag to reveal the brown leather box holding the gold, a box that often went to school with her children for show and tell, she says.
For Caitlyn Jenner, who said she rarely looks at the medal, it stands for a time in her life when, as a male, she was living with what is called gender dysphoria, something no one talked about four decades ago.
"The decathlon was the perfect distraction" for the handsome athlete whose photo graced Wheaties boxes and teenaged girls' bedroom walls.
Back then, Catlyn Jenner says, it was about working hard, training and winning, but sports is "not real life."
Real life, she says, is what she is dealing with now "about who you are as a human being." Sports doesn't make a difference in the world, she said.
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Jenner revealed she is transgender in April 2015 and debuted her new look on the July cover of Vanity Fair.
She had previously revealed she keeps her gold medal in the makeup drawer of her bathroom.
She documented her trip the ladies room in Trump Tower in April without any hassle around the same time the controversial North Carolina law was passed requiring people to use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex stated on their birth certificate.
Much of her life would be very different had she not won that gold medal, Caitlyn Jenner admits.