Top 44 Sebastian Coe Quotes

I do genuinely believe that young people who play sport at a competitive level, sensibly controlled, sensibly organised, that has to be a good thing. It will teach them to win, it will teach them to lose with dignity and magnanimity – all the things you want. It’s a pretty good metaphor for life.

My overwhelming concern will always be the well-being of the athletes. In Olympic sport, it is rare for competitors not to devote half their young life to this. Their families will have given up all sorts of things to allow them to do that.

I don’t think I am a workaholic. I prefer to keep busy. It is better than the alternative.

I’m not sure there are enough coaches in the system that can take young talent and consistently get them into the top five in the world.

Sport was an integral part of school life. The most influential teachers were not necessarily the PE teachers, but the teachers who helped me in sport because they had an understanding of what you were going through.

The characteristic shared by people at the top of their profession is that, to get better, they crave criticism. Most people don’t like criticism, but if you are trying to shave two tenths of a second at 800 metres, that is what you crave.

At university level, I had an economics lecturer who used to joke that I was the only student who handed in essays on British Airways notepaper.

Inspirational leaders need to have a winning mentality in order to inspire respect. It is hard to trust in the leadership of someone who is half-hearted about their purpose, or only sporadic in focus or enthusiasm.

My motivation to compete was always about improving one year to the next. At 34, I realised I’d never run any quicker, so why hang on? But I love running and still run along woodland trails and beaches every few days.

I’m a Chelsea season-ticket holder, and I’ve supported them for 37 years, so any judgment of Manchester United by me is seen as biased.

All pressure is self-inflicted. It’s what you make of it or how you let it rub off on you.

The biggest fragility in a project is often just the inability to be able to explain to people why you are doing it, and when you’re going to do it, and what’s going to happen.

I still run every other day. Longer at weekends. I probably do 35 miles a week.

Interviewing Hugh McIlvanney, I got to read lots of his stuff again. I’m a big fan of his writing.

I’m such an odd mix of things. My grandfather was Indian: I’ve got more family living in India than I do in the U.K. My old man was East London. I was brought up in Yorkshire. My great-grandfather was Irish.

During my first Olympics in 1980, at the age of 23, I was physically in great condition but mentally too inexperienced to cope comfortably in the pressure cooker of an Olympic year.

I think I’m probably just an old-fashioned Tory. I don’t wake up each morning trying to figure out what kind of Conservative I am; for me it’s quite instinctive.

Since the break-up of the 1990s, Russia has not had winter sports facilities. All the winter sport venues were effectively located in countries that are no longer part of the federation. There is a strong argument for saying Sochi’s legacy will be this country will have winter sports facilities it did not have before.

There may be problems we still need to tease out, but we will leave no stone unturned in our bid to make London the host city.

There’s a difference between hurting when you lose and being a bad loser. You don’t compete at the highest level of sport to feel comfortable about losing, but you behave in a civil way when it goes wrong because that is the flip side.

In 1981, I spoke at the Olympic Congress. I was scandalised that I was the first athlete to be given that chance. But I made the most of it.

I don’t want to go back into politics – absolutely not.

I started daily training at the age of 14. When I was 16 years old, I was running twice a day.

Our success in Singapore was a Herculean effort by the whole team. Now I am determined to deliver on all we promised. I will be watching like a hawk.

I’ve never sent an email in my life. My kids laugh. I often hand the phone to them and say, ‘Can you text this message to somebody.’ I don’t even have a computer on my desk.

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.

Charlie Parker was a genius, as was Lester Young.

Nobody ever becomes an expert parent. But I think good parenting is about consistency. It’s about being there at big moments, but it’s also just the consistency of decision making. And it’s routine.

When I moved to Sheffield and went to a secondary modern in the Seventies, there were certain challenges: if you’ve got a name like Sebastian, you either learn to fight or to run.

To anyone who has started out on a long campaign believing that the gold medal was destined for him, the feeling when, all of a sudden, the medal has gone somewhere else is quite indescribable.

Getting the Games for London has been the fulfilment of a dream. It is one which I truly believe can change the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people for the better. But in the end, nothing can quite compare with winning your first Olympic gold medal.

My mother was Indian, brought up in Delhi. My grandparents were born in Bow and Poplar.

I’ve always referred to my father as ‘my coach’ because we were always able to separate our relationship into the roles of coach and parent.

We have to recognise there are very few countries you will take the Games to where somebody doesn’t have issues on foreign or domestic policy.

The great thing about athletics is that it’s like poker sometimes: you know what’s in your hand, and it may be a load of rubbish, but you’ve got to keep up the front.

Some people found it difficult to understand my relationship with my father, but that may have been because they couldn’t get beyond their relationship with their own parents.

In all Games, there is always a tendency, particularly in the lead up to the Games when there isn’t much sport to talk about, to write about things that are not sport.

I will go to my grave believing that participation is best driven by the well-stocked shop window.

World records are only borrowed.

I can remember the day I decided I would retire from competitive athletics as vividly as if it were yesterday.

Vision is a romantic thing. We have got into ‘talent identification’. I am much more interested in passion – finding people who are really excited about doing something.

The Olympics are a world apart from racing for a record. You put out of your mind pretty much what anyone else doing in the race.

Ask me what makes a champion runner, and I will tell you it helps to have the great good sense to choose your parents carefully.

When the subsidies are going out there to fund arts, I’d like to see jazz given a better shake of the dice. It attracts as many people as opera does, but not the subsidies.