The essence of sports is that while you're doing it, nothing else matters, but after you stop, there is a place, generally not very important, where you would put it.

My introduction to track racing was through the background of cross country running, which is not a sport perhaps as popular in America as it is in England.

The reason sport is attractive to many of the general public is that it's filled with reversals. What you think may happen doesn't happen. A champion is beaten, an unknown becomes a champion.

I was playing rugby and the other games English school children do, and there was an event which was planned in which races were run, and I simply just won these by a considerable margin

Athletics is a luxury.

If I faltered, there would be no arms to hold me and the world would be a cold and forbidding place.

Our house was bombed, and the roof fell in. We were sitting under the stairs of the basement, and we were quite safe, but it brought home the realization. In two nights 400 people were killed in small town.