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" 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. "

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" I actually don't believe in big government, and half the time I'm never quite sure I believe in government, generally. "

" 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. "

" There is nothing so marginal as a party that has been in power for 18 years and slides into opposition. You influence nothing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I wouldn't have raced a horse. But you'll then throw back at me that Jesse Owens raced against a horse, and he's one of my heroes, so I'm not going to say it was a silly stunt. I know too much about horses. They're highly unreliable, and they've got brains the size of golf balls. "

" I joined the local athletics club when I was 12, that's what I did. I did it of my own volition. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Football was not what I was put on this planet to do. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" Good running is the ability to have a very well defined on-board computer. The ability to judge distances when running in traffic. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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'm probably one of the few people who can say I did all three types of state sector schooling. "

" Everybody recognises that giving young people competitive outlet through sport is a very good thing. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Marathons don't come to you overnight. "

" I started track and field when I was 12 and didn't get to an Olympic Games until I was nearly 23. By any stretch of the imagination that's a very long apprenticeship. "

" 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. "