Sebastian Coe

You hope all good athletes run on the balls of their feet. You don't want them coming down heel first. The perfect style is the foot to come down with a slight supination and on a tilt to the outside.

Inspirational leaders need to have a winning mentality in order to inspire respect. It is hard to trust in the leadership of someone who is half-hearted about their purpose, or only sporadic in focus or enthusiasm.

The characteristic shared by people at the top of their profession is that, to get better, they crave criticism. Most people don't like criticism, but if you are trying to shave two tenths of a second at 800 metres, that is what you crave.

Sport is a universal language, building more bridges between people than anything else I can think of.

Sport was an integral part of school life. The most influential teachers were not necessarily the PE teachers, but the teachers who helped me in sport because they had an understanding of what you were going through.

I don't want to go back into politics - absolutely not.

I wouldn't have raced a horse. But you'll then throw back at me that Jesse Owens raced against a horse, and he's one of my heroes, so I'm not going to say it was a silly stunt. I know too much about horses. They're highly unreliable, and they've got brains the size of golf balls.

I know many people who are actually queasy about the idea that their kids may harbour sporting ambitions.

When the subsidies are going out there to fund arts, I'd like to see jazz given a better shake of the dice. It attracts as many people as opera does, but not the subsidies.

There's a difference between hurting when you lose and being a bad loser. You don't compete at the highest level of sport to feel comfortable about losing, but you behave in a civil way when it goes wrong because that is the flip side.

Nobody ever becomes an expert parent. But I think good parenting is about consistency. It's about being there at big moments, but it's also just the consistency of decision making. And it's routine.

I don't think I am a workaholic. I prefer to keep busy. It is better than the alternative.