If you work hard in real life, people tend to get in your way - either from inertia or prejudice - and they stop you achieving things. It's the worst thing about real life compared with sports, where you generally get what you deserve: if you're the fastest guy, you win; there are no other games being played.

There are lots of women tennis players, for instance, but because not many of them seem to have much personality, they're interchangeable. You don't have a feeling about them.

Athletes these days are too robotic. People like to see performances filled with emotion. In my career I tried to be amusing, to differentiate myself from the other champions.

Ever since I was a kid, whatever situation I was presented with, I always made the most of it.

Having the ambition of becoming Olympic champion is a whole different ambition from wanting to be the greatest.

People don't want to serve apprenticeships any more. Kids expect to be paid and treated really well and all that guff before they've achieved anything. It doesn't work like that. You have to spend five or six years being relatively rubbish and put up with it. For that you don't deserve to be getting lottery money.

I have the mentality of a winner. I first went to the Olympic Games when I was 17, three weeks after my O-levels, and I remember sitting in a dining-hall filled with the world's best athletes.