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.
Sport is a universal language, building more bridges between people than anything else I can think of.
All pressure is self-inflicted. It's what you make of it or how you let it rub off on you.
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.
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.
World records are only borrowed.
Interviewing Hugh McIlvanney, I got to read lots of his stuff again. I'm a big fan of his writing.
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.
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.
Sacrifice is going to war for your country. Sacrifice is a brave young man being blown up by a landmine in Afghanistan.
Good running is the ability to have a very well defined on-board computer. The ability to judge distances when running in traffic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everybody recognises that giving young people competitive outlet through sport is a very good thing.
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 will go to my grave believing that participation is best driven by the well-stocked shop window.
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.
