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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Sebastian Coe

India

Man

Grandfather

" You hope all good athletes run on the balls of their feet. You don't want them coming down heel first. The perfect style is the foot to come down with a slight supination and on a tilt to the outside. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

Sebastian Coe

Understanding

School

" Quite simply the Games are the biggest opportunity sport in this country has ever had. It is one that we must not squander. "

" We need to be confident. We need not to blink. "

" My mum was critical in getting me to recognise very early on that although what I was doing was pretty serious, quite selfish, and probably to most people pretty obsessive, there actually was more to life than running quickly twice round a track. "

" It is really important that we promote competitive support in schools. It is very important that we recognise that has to be underpinned by good quality physical education and by getting people into patterns of exercise. "

" 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 can be a bit impatient sometimes. If I'm really focusing on something, I can expect everybody to move at the same pace, and that's probably not massively endearing. "

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

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

" 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. "

" The London Games will be designed for the athletes and we will provide them with the very best venues and the very best conditions to pursue their sporting dreams in London. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Sport is a universal language, building more bridges between people than anything else I can think of. "

" 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. "