Words matter. These are the best Daley Thompson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There were only ever two black kids at my school. I never considered myself to be ‘a black kid’. I was who I was. Which isn’t to say things haven’t happened to me that wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t black.
You can be an Olympic champion in 9.5 secs, but to be the greatest, there’s more to it. It takes a bit of forethought and a lot of mental application.
I’m obsessive. I want to know the answer to how good I am. Most people aren’t.
People don’t want to serve apprenticeships any more. Kids expect to be paid and treated really well and all that guff before they’ve achieved anything. It doesn’t work like that. You have to spend five or six years being relatively rubbish and put up with it. For that you don’t deserve to be getting lottery money.
Most people doing the decathlon these days are quite boring, so people don’t relate to them.
Having the ambition of becoming Olympic champion is a whole different ambition from wanting to be the greatest.
I have the mentality of a winner. I first went to the Olympic Games when I was 17, three weeks after my O-levels, and I remember sitting in a dining-hall filled with the world’s best athletes.
I’m competitive – that’s what defines me – and I love it.
What used to drive me was the fact that I wanted to be better than everybody at something. One of my best qualities is that I used whatever other people found to be an adverse thing to be a positive thing for myself.
When I lost my decathlon world record I took it like a man. I only cried for ten hours.
I’ve still got a small fitness and conditioning business where I travel round the world doing stuff for individuals and corporations, mainly fitness training.
Ever since I was a kid, whatever situation I was presented with, I always made the most of it.
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.
I didn’t even know what it was when I started. But I was lucky. I found it at 16. Most people don’t discover decathlon until they’re 21 or 22.
Sport fosters many things that are good; teamwork and leadership.
We live in the best place on earth but at times the worst.
There’s no day when I don’t think it would be great to be 25 years old and have the Olympics coming in less than 300 days – and be the best in the world. I can’t think of anything so motivating.
I did not want to be the best black man of the year; I wanted to be the best man of the year.
Kids are starting at such a low base rate in terms of fitness that it’s taking them years to catch up to where people like me started from. Every little bit is making it more difficult for kids to succeed on a world stage.
I tend to eat vegetables only when I’m with the kids and the rest of the time, I’m a bit slack. But, I am weight-conscious, so I concentrate on avoiding junk food.
Being a decathlete is like having ten girlfriends. You have to love them all, and you can’t afford losing one.
Even if you’ve been involved in a World Cup, the Olympics is huge. Only the Games has the power to change communities.
It’s good to be difficult to know. Too many people are too easy to know.
I am only about winning and getting better.
Sometimes you have to resist working on your strengths in favour of your weaknesses. The decathlon requires a wide range of skills.
Los Angeles was great fun because it was the polar opposite of Moscow in 1980. It was sunny and bright, lots of colours around, whereas Moscow was dark and oppressive.
Kids have been let down by adults – we’ve tried to give them too much, we’ve tried not to impose discipline. We’ve tried to make their lives easier and, in doing so, we’ve taken something away from them. Kids like boundaries, they also like to be pushed, need to learn what failure is all about, need guidance.
If you’re not in it you can’t win it.
I wouldn’t swap the era I competed in for anything, not a day of it. I started out as an amateur, and people like myself, Seb Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram, Tessa Sanderson and the rest did it for the glory of winning medals for our country.
I don’t even have my own computer.
People tend to like an athlete’s performance, but if you don’t get a feeling for the individual, you’re not very emotive about them.
The stopwatch doesn’t lie. The tape measure doesn’t lie.
The decathlon takes so long to learn that people who are good athletes don’t want to go back to the beginning again.
