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.
Interpretation
Success in sports can be influenced by genetics and the choices one makes, including their upbringing.
Sebastian Coe's quote highlights a tongue-in-cheek perspective on the factors that contribute to becoming a champion runner. While hard work and determination are essential, genetic predisposition and a supportive background can play a significant role in athletic success, suggesting that some advantages come from one's heritage and environment.
In practice
In a speech about sports and competition, one might quote this to emphasize the role of genetics in achievement.
Throughout my athletic career, the overall goal was always to be a better athlete than I was at the moment β whether next week, next month or next year. The improvement was the goal. The medal was simply the ultimate reward for achieving that goal.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Success...is no longer a simple ascension of steps. You need to climb sideways and sometimes down, and sometimes you need to swing from the jungle gym and establish your own turf somewhere else on the playground.
To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.
Excellence is the accumulation of hundreds of minute decisions; it is execution at the most granular level. Once you accept the idea that you should give in to things that make no sense because other people do those things and you want to appear reasonable, you are on a path towards mediocrity.
Purchasing the Bobcats is the culmination of my post-playing career goal of becoming the majority owner of an NBA franchise.
I was around when my father finished the last payment of his house. I remember like it was yesterday. He had worked all those years to own that house and he cried. He was so excited and so happy and I want to see other people get that feeling, too.
...treasure what it means to do a day's work. It's our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it's certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day's work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you'll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.
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