We amateur athletes are peculiarly devoted to our fitness, and our obsessions can sometimes be a burden to our loved ones and a mystery to everyone else.
This year I spent two months in Australia, and I did all the training camps in London. It was a really hard winter because I want to give the best performance of my career at the Olympic Games! That is the only title I'm missing and I will do my best to take it!
Behind me are a hard 2 weeks of training, so I feel a little bit tired right now, but my goal for the race in Cardiff and Pau remains the same as in all races. I want to do well and have good runs and enjoy racing. The results come by itself when I do that.
It's not my place to tell you whom to vote for, to take any political stand, to tell you what religion to believe in. I'm an athlete. I can influence certain things, but when I see other athletes and celebrities telling you whom to vote for, I actually get a bit offended.
We, as athletes, have our suspicions about who's cheating, but I'm not convinced that the testing has yet caught up with what people are using or what they are using to disguise it.
In my Olympic history I don't think I have achieved my potential as an athlete. That's what I want when I look back at my career. I want to be able to say I gave it my best shot.
I was glad I did a year abroad, because it helped me as an athlete and as a person. That took me out of my comfort zone. Watching the French athletes train in the Pyrenees made me realise what I had to do to become a top athlete.
You can wish as hard as you like but all that really matters is the shape you're in on the day of the race. I've always felt these really big races aren't necessarily won by whoever is the fastest. They're won by the athlete who is the smartest and in the best shape on the day.
For an athlete, the biggest pressure comes from within. You know what you want to do and what you're capable of.
I had been sort of a rising star - an athlete, a scholar, a leader. My dream was to become a high-level national security adviser.
Laurence Olivier said if you have ambition to be a serious classical actor, you must be as fit as an athlete. For me, the breakthrough was going to live in California. I exercised. I drank less. It was one of the things about California that had a positive impact on me.
Our children, our grandchildren, our students, our young athletes. We need to be pouring leadership principles into them constantly, and teaching, and instructing them how to become good leaders in the future.
I am about helping each and every student athlete that selects to wear the orange, you know, be successful at Tennessee individually and as a team. That type of record is certainly not anything that I have aspirations to reach.
I try to help my athletes visualize their full potential, and then get out of the way as they achieve it.
Celebrity stalkers also are not necessarily fixated on one person as the public thinks. Rather, they tend to switch targets, going from, say, an athlete to an actor to a politician.
Oscar Pistorius is on the cusp of a paradigm shift in which disability becomes ability, disadvantage becomes advantage. Yet we mustn't lose sight of what makes an athlete great. It's too easy to credit Pistorius' success to technology. Through birth or circumstance, some are given certain gifts, but it's what one does with those gifts, the hours devoted to training, the desire to be the best, that is at the true heart of a champion.
Out of the tens of thousands of prosthetic legs they've made, there's never been any 400-meter athletes run under 50 seconds. So, if this was such a technologically advanced prosthetic leg, then how come not everyone's qualifying, or coming close to the qualification time, then?
I think every athlete that’s just out here for the Olympics just does something to inspire those around them and inspire each other.
I came out as a gay as I have earned myself respect as an athlete. I have only lost 2 out of 22 professional fights. I knocked out some of my opponents in the first round. But I never really received respect as a person. That's something I had come to realize over the past few years. The end of my boxing career is no longer that far off, and it was time for me to make peace with myself. And there was a second reason for me to come out: I hoped it would make me a better boxer.
It's physically very, very, very trying to be onstage as a performer, not unlike an athlete, for thirty years.
The first race is really just something that we will all need to get through. Until people see the cars in action I don't think they will understand how quick they will be, which means they are going to be tiring to drive.
Alain will do everything in his power to win, he doesn't like getting beaten by anyone and least of all me.
I consider myself one of a very small handful of drivers in the world that are top drivers. The best one? I don't think anybody can say they're the best one because, from one week to the next, you can be on form or off form a little bit.
All the athletes are individuals. This isn't a team sport. We all have our own styles, our own clothing preferences and our own way of doing things. That's the way I do things and I'm proud of it.
Athletes at all ages are bigger and stronger than ever before. And they are being encouraged - sometimes even incentivized, as we recently learned was the case on at least one National Football League team - to play to injure.
