Great Sporting Wisdom: Legendary Quotes from the World of Sport

Hidden Talents

Somewhere inside that flabby body [Geoff Capes’] was an athlete trying to get out.

Stuart Storey

High Flyers

If you want a track team to win the high jump, you find one person who can jump seven feet, not seven people who can each jump one foot.

Frederick E. Terman

Vogue

The only time our girls looked good in Munich was in the discotheque, between 9 and 11 every night.

US Olympic coach

Realism

I know I’m no Kim Basinger – but she can’t throw the javelin.

Fatima Whitbread

Birth Control

The [Olympic] Games need to take the Pill before the sporting explosion gets entirely out of hand.

Peter Wilson

3. Soundbytes

Job Opportunities

If you’re a sporting star, you’re a sporting star. If you don’t quite make it, you become a coach. If you can’t coach, you become a journalist. If you can’t spell, you introduce Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon.

Desmond Lynam

Darwin Revisited

Tonight, a special Horizon programme, Survival of the Fartest … Fastest.

Richard Baker from the BBC cassette Sporting Gaffes

Sequence Of Events

That performance would have won him the Olympic gold medal in the championship four years ago, which he won anyway.

Desmond Lynam, talking about Sebastian Coe

Get To The Bottom Of It

Harvey Glance, the black American sprinter, with the white top and black bottom.

Ron Pickering

A Change Of Plan

When the pace is slow, sometimes the athletes will make a move they hadn’t planned to make earlier in the race than they planned to do it.

Brendan Foster

Insight

Watch the time – it gives you a good indication of how fast they are running.

Ron Pickering

Carried Away

Anything that matters so much to David Coleman, you realise, doesn’t matter so much at all.

Clive James

Des -ire

Desmond Lynam is so laid back, he’s almost horizontal – which is exactly how his legions of fantasising housewifely fans imagine him to be.

Frank Keating

The Invisible Woman

Zola Budd, so small, so waif-like, you literally cannot see her; but there she is.

Alan Parry

Trivia

The world’s fastest woman is an expert cook.

Daily Graphic headline after Fanny Blankers-Koen won Olympic gold in 1948

Power To All Our Friends

The man [Henry Rono] with asbestos lungs.

Ron Pickering

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