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

World records are only borrowed.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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'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'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.

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.

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.

Marathons don't come to you overnight.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.