When I was in school, there was no such thing as girls’ athletics.
It’s painful to see that after Independence, India hasn’t won a single Olympic medal in athletics.
In my heart of hearts my motivation would always have been to be the best, and I think that athletics is probably what I was built for.
For too long the world has failed to recognise that the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement are about fine athletics and fine art.
I obviously had my family to keep me amused and I took up golf when I retired from athletics.
These have always been my legs. I train harder than other guys, eat better, sleep better and wake up thinking about athletics. I think that’s probably why I’m a bit of an exception.
Athletics needs more focus because it is the heart and soul of any Olympics.
I think sports has done a disservice for a lot of black kids thinking they can only be successful through athletics and entertainment. I want them to know they can be doctors, lawyers, teachers, fireman, police officers, etc.
I think when you are the parents of a gifted athlete, the best thing in the world you can do is to encourage them, in my opinion. My dad didn’t push me and I didn’t push my children in athletics.
You learn early in athletics that you’ll have ups and downs.
I could produce spurts of speed and after taking up athletics I found myself running quite quickly over 400m.
For every dollar we have given to athletics, we have given about 27 to higher education or medical research.
Athletics is not like cricket; we feed on the competition and that makes us bring out the best in us.
I didn’t get an athletics scholarship at a major school.
We want to promote the great qualities of athletics – and maintain its integrity – all over the world.
Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished when manipulated by people with agendas.
I had always been involved in athletics throughout my life.
I’ve always had confidence when it comes to athletics. It’s sometimes stubborn to a fault.
I have long been one of those tedious people who rails against the coronation of ‘student-athletes.’ I have heard the argument that big-time athletics bring in loads of money to universities. I don’t believe the money goes anywhere other than back into the sports teams, but that’s another story.
I did athletics when I was at school. I ran the 100 meters but I got beat once so stopped doing it.
I grew up in athletics, where people keep score.
I find that the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.
I find outdoors easier than indoors, but I am more interested in indoor athletics. I prefer it because it is hotter indoors, and I like the shorter laps.
In the NBA, it’s wins and losses. You don’t have to deal with some of the hypocrisy of college athletics.
I wanted to be a father, and I wanted to be involved in my children’s athletics, school stuff like that.
In athletics, I’ve gone through ups and downs my whole life.
I was good at two things, athletics and lying.
I’m a big proponent of women’s athletics, and I think they have come so far in this country. It’s given opportunities to young girls that they would never have had.
At cricket, I was mainly a bowler and tried to bat. I hit the odd four or six and then got out! In athletics, I was mainly triple jump and 200m.
Throughout life, a positive attitude is important because without it one has a more difficult time achieving any measure of success, whether it be in school, athletics or the working world.
I literally did athletics my whole life.
Don’t walk through life just playing football. Don’t walk through life just being an athlete. Athletics will fade. Character and integrity and really making an impact on someone’s life, that’s the ultimate vision, that’s the ultimate goal – bottom line.
The media is very important, very powerful in athletics today, and we as coaches must try to learn more about what is a delicate job.
When I was in first grade, the kids called me ‘fatso.’ It hurt, but the way I overcame it was to outrun every kid in the class. So I developed a thick skin, and athletics became my way of performing and being accepted.
Athletics, for me, was something I was pushed towards. I really wanted to play football when I was younger. Over the years, I started to enjoy it more and learn about it.
Playing athletics, playing a lot of different sports, going to drama school… I was one of those kids who wanted to do everything, so I ended up being pretty average at everything.
I had a very ordinary background in Sheffield; I went to a secondary modern, but I saw something on TV in 1968 that inspired me to join an athletics club, and 12 years later, with great coaching and the support of people who loved me a lot, I ended up at an Olympic Games.
Athletics at the highest level is a sport within a sport.
The country has to identify and promote raw talent. I have full faith that India will win Olympic gold in athletics sooner than later.
In so many ways, I just love athletics. It would be really hard for me to pivot outside of the sports world.
Thankfully, I found athletics. My mum didn’t like it at first, but the funny thing is that, now, she’s the biggest athletics fan out there. She’s a real expert, and she’s got all the heptathlon books.
I’ve always been a great fan of the state of Pennsylvania. One of the people – one of the people that I admired the most in college athletics was Joe Paterno.
Nothing has done more to bring people of different races and different backgrounds together than athletics, certainly more than politicians have done. It’s why the Greeks invented the Olympics.
I don’t do athletics for any other reason than achieving certain distances, certain titles and goals in my head.
I played rugby in the winter, cricket in the summer, and for a brief period was on the books at Cardiff City. Athletics was only sports day for me. In fact, I never really liked it. I was never too keen on a sport that didn’t have a ball at your feet.
When I’m playing football, it’s what I know; it’s what I’m good at. The spotlight is not just on you: you’re with 10 of your team-mates. I could have done other sports, like tennis and athletics, but I like being part of a team where it’s not just about you; it’s about everybody.
My childhood ambition was to be an Olympic swimmer like my aunt, but that died a quick death when I discovered other sports. I swam very competitively till I was 15, then I swam for fun until I was 18. But athletics remain a very big part of my life.
When I was able to come to a school that not only has some of the best athletics but the best academics, I wanted to make sure I didn’t let this school down.
I want to spend as much time as I can with my kids, but I know the opportunities in athletics don’t often come round, so I’ve just got to make the most of it.
I was always hugely into sport before I started boxing. I played rugby, football, cricket, athletics, swimming.
I turned six in 1977. Youth athletics then was nothing like this, and I wondered how things changed so much. I started looking at our societal emphasis on sports, using the most tangible metric by which we measure emphasis: money.
I got involved in athletics during physical education lessons at school.
The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out.
If athletics wasn’t an option, I’d probably work at like a surf shop in Hawaii on the beach, just dishing out surf boards.
I have moved on now from athletics, but it was difficult initially after I retired.
In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.
I love athletics. As an athlete, I like to believe I can still do the things I used to do when I was once young.
I think as an athlete, especially in a sport like athletics, we don’t wear very much on the track, so you have to look the part.
Athletics keeps us healthy, gets us up and running around. It also gives you an opportunity to meet a lot of different people, which is very important.
Athletics weren’t really in the cards in my family – books, not body.
With women empowerment and women coming together, it’s not about being better than the guys or whatever. It’s just about collaboration; it’s about being equal people and having more of a highlight on women’s athletics and just women being equal in every aspect.
I’ve always played sport. I played rugby, I was involved in athletics, I played cricket… I’m an outdoors kind of guy.
Writing is a little athletic for me. I get worked up a little bit when I do it. So I guess I’m a little bit like that composer conducting. There are a lot of things that go into what I do, but I think athletics really sort of shaped my ethic.
My dad was very critical and had very high expectations without a lot of the details filled in. It was, ‘I expect you to achieve greatness in grades, in athletics, in whatever you do.’
