Sebastian Coe quotes:

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.

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.

I started track and field when I was 12 and didn't get to an Olympic Games until I was nearly 23. By any stretch of the imagination that's a very long apprenticeship.

Sacrifice is going to war for your country. Sacrifice is a brave young man being blown up by a landmine in Afghanistan.

It is really important that we promote competitive support in schools. It is very important that we recognise that has to be underpinned by good quality physical education and by getting people into patterns of exercise.

Since the break-up of the 1990s, Russia has not had winter sports facilities. All the winter sport venues were effectively located in countries that are no longer part of the federation. There is a strong argument for saying Sochi's legacy will be this country will have winter sports facilities it did not have before.

We need to be confident. We need not to blink.

At university level, I had an economics lecturer who used to joke that I was the only student who handed in essays on British Airways notepaper.

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

Competing is exciting and winning is exhilarating, but the true prize will always be the self-knowledge and understanding that you have gained along the way.

Blink and you miss a sprint. The 10,000 meters is lap after lap of waiting. Theatrically, the mile is just the right length: beginning, middle, end, a story unfolding.

My motivation to compete was always about improving one year to the next. At 34, I realised I'd never run any quicker, so why hang on? But I love running and still run along woodland trails and beaches every few days.

I still run every other day. Longer at weekends. I probably do 35 miles a week.

Some people found it difficult to understand my relationship with my father, but that may have been because they couldn't get beyond their relationship with their own parents.

There may be problems we still need to tease out, but we will leave no stone unturned in our bid to make London the host city.

I had a very ordinary background in Sheffield; I went to a secondary modern, but I saw something on TV in 1968 that inspired me to join an athletics club, and 12 years later, with great coaching and the support of people who loved me a lot, I ended up at an Olympic Games.

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've never sent an email in my life. My kids laugh. I often hand the phone to them and say, 'Can you text this message to somebody.' I don't even have a computer on my desk.

Our success in Singapore was a Herculean effort by the whole team. Now I am determined to deliver on all we promised. I will be watching like a hawk.

I've always referred to my father as 'my coach' because we were always able to separate our relationship into the roles of coach and parent.

The Olympics are a world apart from racing for a record. You put out of your mind pretty much what anyone else doing in the race.

I have always been very good at being able to structure my time. My mother had a huge influence on me. My dad was my coach. He was a hugely influential figure.

I will go to my grave believing that participation is best driven by the well-stocked shop window.

Good running is the ability to have a very well defined on-board computer. The ability to judge distances when running in traffic.

Everybody recognises that giving young people competitive outlet through sport is a very good thing.

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

Vision is a romantic thing. We have got into 'talent identification'. I am much more interested in passion - finding people who are really excited about doing something.

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.

To anyone who has started out on a long campaign believing that the gold medal was destined for him, the feeling when, all of a sudden, the medal has gone somewhere else is quite indescribable.

All pressure is self-inflicted. It's what you make of it or how you let it rub off on you.

I've always felt that long, slow distance produces long, slow runners.

I joined the local athletics club when I was 12, that's what I did. I did it of my own volition.

I think I'm probably just an old-fashioned Tory. I don't wake up each morning trying to figure out what kind of Conservative I am; for me it's quite instinctive.

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.

Quite simply the Games are the biggest opportunity sport in this country has ever had. It is one that we must not squander.

There is nothing so marginal as a party that has been in power for 18 years and slides into opposition. You influence nothing.

When I moved to Sheffield and went to a secondary modern in the Seventies, there were certain challenges: if you've got a name like Sebastian, you either learn to fight or to run.

If you lived in Sheffield and were called Sebastian, you had to learn to run fast at a very early stage.

It is to create the best Games the world has ever seen by unlocking the UK's unrivalled passion for sport, by delivering the best Games for athletes to compete in, by showcasing London's unmatched cultural wealth and diversity and by creating a real and lasting legacy.

The great thing about athletics is that it's like poker sometimes: you know what's in your hand, and it may be a load of rubbish, but you've got to keep up the front.

I'm a Chelsea season-ticket holder, and I've supported them for 37 years, so any judgment of Manchester United by me is seen as biased.

I can be a bit impatient sometimes. If I'm really focusing on something, I can expect everybody to move at the same pace, and that's probably not massively endearing.

During my first Olympics in 1980, at the age of 23, I was physically in great condition but mentally too inexperienced to cope comfortably in the pressure cooker of an Olympic year.

Charlie Parker was a genius, as was Lester Young.

I do genuinely believe that young people who play sport at a competitive level, sensibly controlled, sensibly organised, that has to be a good thing. It will teach them to win, it will teach them to lose with dignity and magnanimity - all the things you want. It's a pretty good metaphor for life.

We have to recognise there are very few countries you will take the Games to where somebody doesn't have issues on foreign or domestic policy.

Getting the Games for London has been the fulfilment of a dream. It is one which I truly believe can change the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people for the better. But in the end, nothing can quite compare with winning your first Olympic gold medal.

The biggest fragility in a project is often just the inability to be able to explain to people why you are doing it, and when you're going to do it, and what's going to happen.

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'm such an odd mix of things. My grandfather was Indian: I've got more family living in India than I do in the U.K. My old man was East London. I was brought up in Yorkshire. My great-grandfather was Irish.

I was ecstatic when we won - to host the Olympics is one of the biggest opportunities in living memory. It will help change the lives of young people and transform east London.

Ask me what makes a champion runner, and I will tell you it helps to have the great good sense to choose your parents carefully.

I became a great runner because if you're a kid in Leeds and your name is Sebastian you've got to become a great runner.

I believed that we had to answer the question: Why are we doing this? And it wasn't until we started to articulate, internally as an organisation, that it was about using the Games to inspire young people to participate in sports that we each understood what we had to do.

I might have to consider coaching- I'm getting too old to be a world class runner and my mind isn't gone enough to become an official.

Im not sure there are enough coaches in the system that can take young talent and consistently get them into the top five in the world.

The Americans sowed the seed, and now they have reaped the whirlwind

The London Games will be designed for the athletes and we will provide them with the very best venues and the very best conditions to pursue their sporting dreams in London.

The nine inches right here; set it straight and you can beat anybody in the world.

The Paralympians have lifted the cloud of limitation.

This is not going to be business as usual. This is business unusual

Tomorrow is another day, and there will be another battle!

World records are only borrowed.