78 Quotes by Daley Thompson

I think one of the things about being a good coach is to recognise when you have given all that you can. In fact there should be some sort of unspoken law that says that a coach cannot have anyone for three or four years - if you have not passed on most of the stuff you know in that time, then you are not doing a good job.

I did not want to be the best black man of the year; I wanted to be the best man of the year.

Being a decathlete is like having ten girlfriends. You have to love them all, and you can't afford losing one.

But if kids take up things like hockey and football they will go back to it.

Kids are starting at such a low base rate in terms of fitness that it's taking them years to catch up to where people like me started from. Every little bit is making it more difficult for kids to succeed on a world stage.

Most people doing the decathlon these days are quite boring, so people don't relate to them.

The decathlon takes so long to learn that people who are good athletes don't want to go back to the beginning again.

What used to drive me was the fact that I wanted to be better than everybody at something. One of my best qualities is that I used whatever other people found to be an adverse thing to be a positive thing for myself.

Frankly I don't follow Indian athletics to a great extent but I do know that it has started to pick up a bit of late. Five years hence, I expect Indian athletes to be a force to reckon with.