"During a photo-call with fellow Olympic gold medallist Duncan Goodhew- Pity Steve Ovett didn't show up. Then we could have had the good, the bald and the ugly."
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Quote collection
Daley Thompson quotes (page 2 of 3)
46 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"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."
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"I did not want to be the best black man of the year; I wanted to be the best man of the year."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The decathlon takes so long to learn that people who are good athletes don't want to go back to the beginning again."
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"For kids it's natural to be competitive."
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"The stopwatch doesn't lie. The tape measure doesn't lie."
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"But if kids take up things like hockey and football they will go back to it."
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"I am only about winning and getting better."
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"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."
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"Even if you've been involved in a World Cup, the Olympics is huge. Only the Games has the power to change communities."
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"We crave instant success these days. If you are a really good sprinter and long jumper, you don't want to spend two or three years on a whole new set of events. You're used to doing well and it's difficult to give that up."
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"Retiring was hard. I'd spent 15 years doing something I loved, but when you get older everything seems to go. When I started spending too long with the physio and the doctor, I knew it was time to call it a day. But I had no preparation for being retired and I didn't know what to do."
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"When you're walking into the stadium, you just say to yourself, 'the 100m is the same anywhere, the shot put is the same weight anywhere.'"
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"When we stage the Olympics it will inspire kids all over the country. A kid in Scotland or Ireland will be encouraged to take up sport."
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"I think one of the things about being a good coach is to recognise when you have given all that you can. In fact there should be some sort of unspoken law that says that a coach cannot have anyone for three or four years - if you have not passed on most of the stuff you know in that time, then you are not doing a good job."
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"Athletes these days are too robotic. People like to see performances filled with emotion. In my career I tried to be amusing, to differentiate myself from the other champions."
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"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."
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