When you're competing, you don't have the choice of what the weather will be like. It really doesn't affect me. I ran one of my fastest times in the New York Diamond League meeting last year. It was raining pretty hard then.

I want to wake up every day and feel that I'm training harder than my competitors, that I'm dieting harder, that I'm recovering better. That's what gives me confidence when I'm lining up on the blocks. I've never gone out to prove people wrong. I just want to be the best that I can possibly be.

Thank you to everyone that has made me the athlete I am! God, family and friends, my competitors and supporters! You have all had a hand!

Everyone has setbacks. I'm no different. I happen to have no legs. That's pretty much the fact.

It's impossible to make everyone happy. Some will choose to see the negative. None is perfect but find a way of loving them perfectly!

The more I accomplish, the more pressure I put on myself.

Oscar Pistorius is on the cusp of a paradigm shift in which disability becomes ability, disadvantage becomes advantage. Yet we mustn't lose sight of what makes an athlete great. It's too easy to credit Pistorius' success to technology. Through birth or circumstance, some are given certain gifts, but it's what one does with those gifts, the hours devoted to training, the desire to be the best, that is at the true heart of a champion.