Sebastian Coe Quotations

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 don't think I am a workaholic. I prefer to keep busy. It is better than the alternative.

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.

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.

The great thing about athletics is that it's like poker sometimes: you know what's in your hand, and it may be a load of rubbish, but you've got to keep up the front.

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.

Nobody ever becomes an expert parent. But I think good parenting is about consistency. Its about being there at big moments, but its also just the consistency of decision making. And its routine.

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 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.

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

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

I know many people who are actually queasy about the idea that their kids may harbour sporting ambitions.

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

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.

I have always been very good at being able to structure my time. My mother had a huge influence on me. My dad was my coach. He was a hugely influential figure.

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.

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.

I've never sent an email in my life. My kids laugh. I often hand the phone to them and say, 'Can you text this message to somebody.' I don't even have a computer on my desk.

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 think I'm probably just an old-fashioned Tory. I don't wake up each morning trying to figure out what kind of Conservative I am; for me it's quite instinctive.

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.

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.

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

Our success in Singapore was a Herculean effort by the whole team. Now I am determined to deliver on all we promised. I will be watching like a hawk.

At university level, I had an economics lecturer who used to joke that I was the only student who handed in essays on British Airways notepaper.

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.

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.

From our initial observations, our hard work has paid off. This is a springboard for the next 30 days. We are in good shape to take the battle even harder and further towards our goal of bringing the Olympic Games to London in 2012.

I am delighted that Jonathan will be the athlete member of the LOCOG board,

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.

My overwhelming concern will always be the well-being of the athletes. In Olympic sport, it is rare for competitors not to devote half their young life to this. Their families will have given up all sorts of things to allow them to do that.

I was ecstatic when we won - to host the Olympics is one of the biggest opportunities in living memory. It will help change the lives of young people and transform east London.

Like the other bidding cities, we will be our making final efforts to communicate the essential message of the London bid. We arrived here early to allow us to focus on finalizing our presentation. This has been a good opportunity to finalize the scripts, to take a further look at our visual material and to arrive in the centre of Singapore refreshed and better able to focus on the conversations we need to have.

Sport is a bridgehead into any number of things we want. It's not going to be enough to sit there in 2012 saying we didn't get any medals but got lots of social outcomes. I hope in light of what comes out of here UK Athletics will make some tough judgments.

I will go to my grave believing that participation is best driven by the well-stocked shop window.

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.

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

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.

I still run every other day. Longer at weekends. I probably do 35 miles a week.

I think it is an appropriate time to be reminding people that eight weeks ago we landed the biggest prize in sport and reminding the thousands of Londoners and people throughout the UK that helped us. We couldn't have got across the line without them.

We have worked through a comprehensive agenda in a spirit of partnership and cooperation. We could not have started on a better footing.

We have to recognise there are very few countries you will take the Games to where somebody doesn't have issues on foreign or domestic policy.

We couldn't have got across the line without them.

We really want the Games, this is our third time trying.

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.

We are delighted - a lot of hard work has paid off

We are delighted that he will be flying the flag for us on July 6th.

We are taking home the biggest prize in sport.

We have been able to maintain our momentum until now but are we are entering the critical phase.

This represents a significant saving of public funds and we will strive to bring the same discipline to the financing of the games,

Don't expect to see an Olympic Stadium up after Christmas, but don't also be lulled into believing nothing is happening because right at this moment, construction is underway. Work has started and it's started very quickly.

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 started daily training at the age of 14. When I was 16 years old, I was running twice a day.

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

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.

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.

Sacrifice is going to war for your country. Sacrifice is a brave young man being blown up by a landmine in Afghanistan.

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've always referred to my father as 'my coach' because we were always able to separate our relationship into the roles of coach and parent.

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.

This city provides a wonderful global platform to promote the Olympic movement particularly to a young audience.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

David Higgins did not say there was a two billion overrun. This is not what he said and he did not mention a figure.

Doing as much as we can in the critical early years of the Olympic planning cycle will ensure that London and the U.K. get the best possible long-term benefits from the new Olympic facilities and services,

The international people tell us that we are taken seriously and that there is a momentum.

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

Charlie Parker was a genius, as was Lester Young.

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

Sorry. Have to catch my mates and have some fun.

The Cabinet was a very important staging post for us

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

It's at a crucial stage of the race,

It's just the most fantastic opportunity to do everything we ever dreamed of in British sport. This was the most splendid team performance,

I am particularly delighted that so many of the members of the evaluation commission are on this team. They already have a great insight about our plans, aspirations and visions.

I don't want to go back into politics - absolutely not.

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

Throughout my athletic career, the overall goal was always to be a better athlete than I was at the moment – whether next week, next month or next year. The improvement was the goal. The medal was simply the ultimate reward for achieving that goal.

Competing is exciting and winning is exhilarating, but the true prize will always be the self-knowledge and understanding that you have gained along the way.

The nine inches right here; set it straight and you can beat anybody in the world.

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.

World records are only borrowed.

I've always felt that long, slow distance produces long, slow runners.

If you lived in Sheffield and were called Sebastian, you had to learn to run fast at a very early stage.

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

Tomorrow is another day, and there will be another battle!

The Paralympians have lifted the cloud of limitation.

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.

Blink and you miss a sprint. The 10,000 meters is lap after lap of waiting. Theatrically, the mile is just the right length: beginning, middle, end, a story unfolding.

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.

I might have to consider coaching- I'm getting too old to be a world class runner and my mind isn't gone enough to become an official.

It is to create the best Games the world has ever seen by unlocking the UK's unrivalled passion for sport, by delivering the best Games for athletes to compete in, by showcasing London's unmatched cultural wealth and diversity and by creating a real and lasting legacy.

The Americans sowed the seed, and now they have reaped the whirlwind

I became a great runner because if you're a kid in Leeds and your name is Sebastian you've got to become a great runner.

Im 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.