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

It's good to be difficult to know. Too many people are too easy to know.

In my heart of hearts my motivation would always have been to be the best, and I think that athletics is probably what I was built for.

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

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 didn't even know what it was when I started. But I was lucky. I found it at 16. Most people don't discover decathlon until they're 21 or 22.

Retiring was hard. I'd spent 15 years doing something I loved, but when you get older everything seems to go. When I started spending too long with the physio and the doctor, I knew it was time to call it a day. But I had no preparation for being retired and I didn't know what to do.