Top 40 Daley Thompson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sport and health are so important to our nation that they deserve to be right at the front of people’s minds.”

— Daley Thompson

2. “The only limitations are mental. The guy who thinks positively will win.”

— Daley Thompson

3. “Sport fosters many things that are good; teamwork and leadership.”

— Daley Thompson

4. “The stopwatch doesn’t lie. The tape measure doesn’t lie.”

— Daley Thompson

5. “Sometimes you have to resist working on your strengths in favour of your weaknesses. The decathlon requires a wide range of skills.”

— Daley Thompson

6. “Having the ambition of becoming Olympic champion is a whole different ambition from wanting to be the greatest.”

— Daley Thompson

7. “I’m competitive – that’s what defines me – and I love it.”

— Daley Thompson

8. “I don’t even have my own computer.”

— Daley Thompson

9. “In sport, if you want to be the best you have to compete against the best – I would much rather have come tenth and be judged against everyone than come first and be judged against just a few.”

— Daley Thompson

10. “I am an education ambassador, mainly working with schools.”

— Daley Thompson

11. “Being a decathlete is like having ten girlfriends. You have to love them all, and you can’t afford losing one.”

— Daley Thompson

12. “When you’re walking into the stadium, you just say to yourself, ‘the 100m is the same anywhere, the shot put is the same weight anywhere.’”

— Daley Thompson

13. “We crave instant success these days. If you are a really good sprinter and long jumper, you don’t want to spend two or three years on a whole new set of events. You’re used to doing well and it’s difficult to give that up.”

— Daley Thompson

14. “Kids are starting at such a low base rate in terms of fitness that it’s taking them years to catch up to where people like me started from. Every little bit is making it more difficult for kids to succeed on a world stage.”

— Daley Thompson

15. “Retiring was hard. I’d spent 15 years doing something I loved, but when you get older everything seems to go. When I started spending too long with the physio and the doctor, I knew it was time to call it a day. But I had no preparation for being retired and I didn’t know what to do.”

— Daley Thompson

16. “If you don’t want to grow old, then slow down the slowing down process.”

— Daley Thompson

17. “During a photo-call with fellow Olympic gold medallist Duncan Goodhew- Pity Steve Ovett didn’t show up. Then we could have had the good, the bald and the ugly.”

— Daley Thompson

18. “There’s no day when I don’t think it would be great to be 25 years old and have the Olympics coming in less than 300 days – and be the best in the world. I can’t think of anything so motivating.”

— Daley Thompson

19. “In my heart of hearts my motivation would always have been to be the best, and I think that athletics is probably what I was built for.”

— Daley Thompson

20. “When I lost my decathlon world record I took it like a man. I only cried for ten hours.”

— Daley Thompson

21. “Most people doing the decathlon these days are quite boring, so people don’t relate to them.”

— Daley Thompson

22. “Athletes these days are too robotic. People like to see performances filled with emotion. In my career I tried to be amusing, to differentiate myself from the other champions.”

— Daley Thompson

23. “The decathlon takes so long to learn that people who are good athletes don’t want to go back to the beginning again.”

— Daley Thompson

24. “I am only about winning and getting better.”

— Daley Thompson

25. “I have the mentality of a winner. I first went to the Olympic Games when I was 17, three weeks after my O-levels, and I remember sitting in a dining-hall filled with the world’s best athletes.”

— Daley Thompson

26. “There are lots of women tennis players, for instance, but because not many of them seem to have much personality, they’re interchangeable. You don’t have a feeling about them.”

— Daley Thompson

27. “Los Angeles was great fun because it was the polar opposite of Moscow in 1980. It was sunny and bright, lots of colours around, whereas Moscow was dark and oppressive.”

— Daley Thompson

28. “Even if you’ve been involved in a World Cup, the Olympics is huge. Only the Games has the power to change communities.”

— Daley Thompson

29. “I’ve still got a small fitness and conditioning business where I travel round the world doing stuff for individuals and corporations, mainly fitness training.”

— Daley Thompson

30. “I did not want to be the best black man of the year; I wanted to be the best man of the year.”

— Daley Thompson

31. “But if kids take up things like hockey and football they will go back to it.”

— Daley Thompson

32. “I didn’t even know what it was when I started. But I was lucky. I found it at 16. Most people don’t discover decathlon until they’re 21 or 22.”

— Daley Thompson

33. “When we stage the Olympics it will inspire kids all over the country. A kid in Scotland or Ireland will be encouraged to take up sport.”

— Daley Thompson

34. “I tend to eat vegetables only when I’m with the kids and the rest of the time, I’m a bit slack. But, I am weight-conscious, so I concentrate on avoiding junk food.”

— Daley Thompson

35. “People tend to like an athlete’s performance, but if you don’t get a feeling for the individual, you’re not very emotive about them.”

— Daley Thompson

36. “You can be an Olympic champion in 9.5 secs, but to be the greatest, there’s more to it. It takes a bit of forethought and a lot of mental application.”

— Daley Thompson

37. “What used to drive me was the fact that I wanted to be better than everybody at something. One of my best qualities is that I used whatever other people found to be an adverse thing to be a positive thing for myself.”

— Daley Thompson

38. “I’m obsessive. I want to know the answer to how good I am. Most people aren’t.”

— Daley Thompson

39. “For kids it’s natural to be competitive.”

— Daley Thompson

40. “Ever since I was a kid, whatever situation I was presented with, I always made the most of it.”

— Daley Thompson

41. “It’s good to be difficult to know. Too many people are too easy to know.”

— Daley Thompson