Malcolm Gladwell Sports Quotations

The paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he pushes himself too far, his hematocrit will fall.

When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.

Jenny Simpson loses her shoe in the women's fifteen hundred, with a lap and a half to go, destroying her chances to repeat as world champion, and she gives the most gracious interview afterward about how she's had a wonderful career already. Great for Jenny Simpson. Bad for the sport! We need drama!

Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?

What track needs to figure out: how to engage us between the races. Instead, the entire off-the-track conversation is about doping. This is how you kill a sport.

David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - "The Sports Gene" - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an "all-star challenge" on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decathlon.

It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences.

If there is one thing I learned by reading Epstein's "The Sports Gene" it is that world-class athletes are, by definition, abnormal: that is, the kind of person capable of competing at that level is necessarily very different from the rest of us physiologically. They are outliers.