Olympics From The Athletes Quotes

I went to Beijing for the Olympics and was literally right across the track from Usain Bolt. And when he gets to full stride, for every two steps the other guy's taking, he's just taking one. ~ Wendell Pierce

Sophia was determined and relentless, just like his wife. The day that either of them allowed their men to know better, would be the day that Hell froze over and hosted the winter Olympics. From Book 2 of the Teen Mayhem Series 'This Too Shall Pass ~ K.T. Bowes Writing As Katie Bowes

For most Olympic athletes, their training is their hardest challenge and where they push themselves to the limit. For Paralympians, training and competition is an escape from the hardships and struggles of their everyday life. That is the difference. ~ Giles Duley

The world of sports knows no religious, racial or political differences. Athletes, from whatever land they come, speak the same language. The lessons of competition are lessons for life. ~ Robert Kennedy

We also notice that Paul was focused. He had a clear goal, and he would not veer to the right or to the left from it. We can't help but wonder how many emails Paul would have skipped over, or how current he would have been with the news of the day, or even how vigorously he would be rooting for his favorite sports teams or athletes. Our ability to have information quickly is both a blessing and a curse. Our ability to function in a fast-paced society sometimes encourages us to focus on nothing of lasting value, just running from one temporal thing to the next. Just ~ James MacDonald

Great athletes practice, train, study, and develop. So do great learners. As students empowering ourselves with knowledge, what can we learn from Olympic-caliber athletes about success, and how to achieve it?
1.Preparation = Success!
"If you fail to prepare, you're prepared to fail." - Mark Spitz, Gold Medalist, Swimming
2.Learning is lifelong
"Never put an age limit on your dreams." - Dara Torres, Gold Medalist, Swimming
3.Failure is opportunity
"One shouldn't be afraid to lose" - Oksana Baiul, Gold Medalist, Figure Skating
4.The only person who can stop you is yourself
"This ability to conquer oneself is no doubt the most precious of all things sports bestows." - Olga Korbut, Gold Medalist, Gymnastics
5.Learning is fun!
"If you're not having fun, then what the hell are you doing?" - Allison Jones, six-time Paralympian
6.You have to be in it to win it
"Failure I can live with. Not trying is what I can't handle." - Sanya Richards-Ross, Gold Medalist, Track & Field
There are always new skills to learn, new challenges to overcome, new ways to succeed. The only guarantee of failure is if you don't get started in the first place. ~ Udacity

We must endure, Alyosha. That was the only thing she could say in response to my accounts of the ugliness and dreariness of life, of the suffering of the people - of everything against which I protested so vehemently. I was not made for endurance, and if occasionally I exhibited this virtue of cattle, wood, and stone, I did so only to test myself, to try my strength and my stability. Sometimes young people, in the foolishness of immaturity, or in envy of the strength of their elders, strive, even successfully, to lift weights that overtax their bones and muscles; in their vanity they attempt to cross themselves with two-pood weights, like mature athletes. I too did this, in the literal and figurative sense, physically and spiritually, and only good fortune kept me from injuring myself fatally or crippling myself for life.
For nothing cripples a person so dreadfully as endurance, as a humble submission to the forces of circumstance. ~ Maxim Gorky

This automatic feedback is another reason extreme athletes have found flow so frequently, but what if we're interested in pulling this trigger without help from the laws of physics? No mystery here. Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn't have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops - stock analysis, psychiatry, and medicine - even the best get worse over time. ~ Steven Kotler

The cyclicality of hard alternating with easy plays out not only in the day and the week but also across training cycles and even across years. Think of Olympians who take an easy year or two in their quadrennial cycles. Check that there is variety across your training at every level, from the cooldown after a hard workout to the easier year after a particularly tough season. Active recovery, both in easy workouts and in easy days, introduces variability to training. Remember Carl Foster's finding, outlined in Chapter 4, that athletes can adapt better to a greater overall training stress when it is variable instead of monotonous. Make the easy days really easy so that the hard days can be truly hard. If you can rein in your effort on your easy days, you'll have room to push a little faster or a little longer on your hard days, yielding a much bigger fitness reward than simply muddling through with easy days that are too hard and hard days that therefore become too slow or short. ~ Rountree Sage

DJ Tiesto was my first inspiration. I heard him play at the Olympics in 2004 and from that moment on I knew I wanted to make music and become a DJ. I made a bootleg of a track by Enrique Iglesias called Tonight. ~ Martin Garrix

Tough Olympic news for the Romneys. Ann Romney's horse Rafalka did not advance to the Olympic finals. Apparently it was beat by a smooth-talking socialist horse from Kenya. ~ Conan O'Brien

What separates sports from entrepreneurism, however, is that in business we constantly have to overcome undefined and unpredictable challenges. Athletes train for specific events and conditions, whereas entrepreneurs generally have little idea what they will encounter along the way. ~ Naveen Jain

Well, I do feel that I carry the responsibility of representing my country wherever I am, and this responsibility came with the success that I had in last couple of years, not just myself but the whole group of tennis players that comes from Serbia. And athletes in general are, in this moment, the biggest ambassadors that our country has. ~ Novak Djokovic

How did high schools all over the country decide that athletes needed pep rallies to boost their pride and self-esteem? Isn't it enough that people actually pay money to see these kids compete in games? That people cheer from the sidelines? And they get their names in the paper? Why don't they take all the lonely ghost floaters in every high school and have a pep rally for them? Make all the most popular kids in school sit on the hard bleachers and cheer until their asses hurt like hell? ~ Matthew Quick

During the same hours of 1993 when the chopper crews in Somalia were slowly being overpowered and gunned down, there were twenty-four young boys back in the United States who would grow up to be future players in that African struggle. They had no way to know anything yet about the unique fighting group every one of them would eventually strive with all his determination to join. They also couldn't know, though they would one day find out in person, that this particular battle corps is so elite, the candidate must first be a Navy SEAL just to attempt to get through the training - and even then, three out of four of those superb warrior-athletes fail to qualify.
The group has had numerous military names during its long rise from the murky history of the early "frogmen" swimmers, to the black operations of the Underwater Demolition Teams whose only calling card was to render their targets dead, to the latest appellation as the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group - or DEVGRU, for those who prefer names ugly and short. But the group is better known to the general public as the near-mythical warriors of "SEAL Team Six." Their complex training supports a brilliantly simple task: to be the very last thing their opponents see, if they are ever seen at all. ~ Anthony Flacco

Experiencing this pain in my muscles and aching and going on and on is my challenge. The last three or four reps is what makes the muscles grow. This area of pain divides a champion from someone who is not a champion. That's what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they'll go through the pain no matter what happens. I have no fear of fainting. I do squats until I fall over and pass out. So what? It's not going to kill me. I wake up five minutes later and I'm OK. A lot of other athletes are afraid of this. So they don't pass out. They don't go on. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

I had trouble finding my next goal after winning a gold medal at the Vancouver Olympics, but the interest of the public and my fans in me got even bigger. I wanted to get away from the pressure, even for a single day. ~ Kim Yuna

7 Lessons on Failure You Can Learn From Top Athletes



What's the key to progress? You could state diligent work or commitment or even an inspirational mentality. Yet, the genuine mystery? Disappointment.
Your past disappointments are straightforwardly identified with your future achievement. Without them, you may not be sufficiently inspired to achieve your objectives. Competitors confront overcome regularly all through their vocations yet don't give it a chance to get them down. Rather, they let it drive them to progress. A recent report in which the analysts met Olympic gold medalists found that a large number of those competitors considered mishaps basic to their gold decoration wins.

Disappointment is similarly as basic to your profession, regardless of what your teach. For whatever length of time that you have the correct disposition and view your disappointments as learning encounters, you can utilize them to push forward and make progress.

Here are seven lessons that the world's best competitors can show you about disappointment.

1.There is no such thing as flawlessness.
This past August, Olympic champion Usain Bolt kept running in the men's 100-meter race at the IAAF World Championships in London. Despite the fact that he was relied upon to win, he completed third, denoting his first misfortune in an Olympic or big showdown last and consummation a 45-race winning streak.
While Bolt is generally ~ Businessplans

As I look back on the day I signed my professional contract in 1973, I've never gone to sleep wondering if I could pay the bills or take care of my family. That's what basketball has done for me. It's given me the greatest of thrills from high school to college to the Olympics to coaching to broadcasting. ~ Doug Collins

One of the things I learned from working on the Olympics was, the world does not need another big multimedia show. ~ Laurie Anderson

There can be distractions, but if you're isolated from the heart of the Games, the Olympics become just another competition. ~ Mary Lou Retton

Sports in Indonesia aren't being supported by the government. The rewards you get as a young player don't match the effort you put in. I want to be different from other athletes, if not better, and I want to make something good out of my profile and help the younger players have opportunities. ~ Taufik Hidayat

It's probably the toughest distance race in the world to win. World class runners from 1500m to the marathon contest it and instead of just three runners from each country, like in the Olympics or World Championships, in the senior men's race there are nine. ~ Paul Tergat

I would see her floating away from me, celestial and solitary, in an ethereal chairlift, up and up, to a glittering summit where laughing athletes stripped to the waist were waiting for her, for her. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

As a little kid, not only is my dad Jo-Jo White, but M. L. Carr is involved in the family, Red Auerbach is my godfather, and my stepmother was an Olympic-caliber sprinter. Athletes were all around. I happened to be a natural athlete. If I wasn't, it might have been hell. But I never got any pressure from my mom and dad to be an athlete. ~ Brian J. White

The human police had come to the bar outside Shiftertown to ask Liam about the reported noise in Shiftertown that day, and Liam had glibly told them, "Shifter games." He'd smiled his warm smile and let his Irish lilt roll from his tongue. Kim had backed him up, as had Silas the reporter. "Running and jumping and other frolicking," Liam had said. "Like your human Olympics but not as organized. ~ Jennifer Ashley

Boxing is a glorious sport to watch and boxers are incredible, heroic athletes, but it's also, to be honest, a stupid game to play. Even the winners can end up with crippling brain damage. In a lot of ways, hustling is the same. But you learn something special from playing the most difficult games, the games where winning is close to impossible and losing is catastrophic: You learn how to compete as if your life depended on it. That's the lesson I brought with me to the so-called "legitimate" world. ~ Jay-Z

Getting to know athletes from all over the planet is a big part of the Olympic experience. ~ Mary Lou Retton

Everyone who has been to an Olympics says expect the unexpected. That kind of psychology games does go on, so I'm kind of expecting things to happen but I don't know who from. I think it's kind of silly but I'm prepared for it. I'd probably just laugh it off because it means that they are afraid of racing me, so it's like a huge compliment ~ Libby Trickett

To be sure, [NASCAR] stars were initially ex-bootleggers for the most part drawn from that talent pool in the Carolinas hills: "good ol' boys" as they referred to themselves. That's exactly how they would be described in the press that slowly became enamored with their raucous life style. That has all changed, with the drivers of today polished and clean-cut athletes who are expected to behave like commercial puppets in public. ~ Brock Yates

By continually increasing the difficulty of the sport, we are discouraging younger athletes from starting and continuing in the sport. But most importantly, we are losing the beauty of our sport. We do not want gymnastics to lose what makes it so great - its artistic beauty. ~ Svetlana Boginskaya

It is exactly the unattainability, which differentiates a dream from a goal: Goals are reachable, when you fight for them. Dreams are not. Athletes shouldn't dream, but set goals for themselves and fight for them. ~ Fabian Cancellara

Heartbreak is our indication of sincerity: in a love relationship, in a work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete's quick but abstract ability to let go ... But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way ... ~ David Whyte

We take Tod and Stevie to the mall with us, we'd be in and out in thirty minutes. Those boys don't fuck around at the mall. They got, like, a different kind of gay-dar," Daisy told Tex. "It's the kind that they can hone in on the best outfit, pair of shoes, or whatever you need, find your size without even askin' and feed you the shit in your dressing room without you havin' to leave it. They don't spare your feelin's either. If it don't look good, they just snatch it from you and find you somethin' else. They could do it in the Olympics, they're so good. ~ Kristen Ashley