Explore the wonderful quotes under this tag
At an Olympics Game, you want to enjoy it, especially if you know it's going to be your last one.
Sep 29, 2025
The Olympics are always a special competition. It is very difficult to predict what will happen.
I swam my brains out.
For athletes, the Olympics are the ultimate test of their worth.
The Olympics have been with the world since 776 B.C., and have only been interrupted by war, especially in the modern era.
If you don't try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody's back yard.
My only focus was the Olympics because in my sport, that is the ultimate. Everything is geared toward that, and my entire life was geared around getting there and winning gold.
An Olympic medal is the greatest achievement and honor that can be received by an athlete. I would swap any World Title to have won gold at the Olympics.
The only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
Holding an Olympic Games means evoking history.
The Olympic Games are for the world and all nations must be admitted to them.
As a kid, you dream of winning the Stanley Cup. As you get older, you understand the importance of winning the Olympics.
The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.
The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.
Had my dream again where I'm making love, and the Olympic judges are watching. I'd nailed the compulsories, so this is it, the finals. I got a 9.8 from the Canadians, a perfect 10 from the Americans, and my mother, disguised as an East German judge, gave me a 5.6. Must have been the dismount.
The Olympic Games must not be an end in itself, they must be a means of creating a vast program of physical education and sports competitions for all young people.
There can be distractions, but if you're isolated from the heart of the Games, the Olympics become just another competition.
The Olympics remain the most compelling search for excellence that exists in sport, and maybe in life itself.
I can't remember the last day I didn't train.
I got a bronze medal and I can't complain about that, the only African-American to get a medal in the Winter Olympics.
The Olympics is my favourite sporting event. Although I have a problem with that silver medal. When you think about it, you win the gold - you feel good, you win the bronze - you think, 'Well at least I got something'. But when you win silver, it's like, 'Congratulations, you 'almost' won. Of all the losers, you came in first of that group. You're the number one 'loser.' No one lost ahead of you.
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.
The greatest memory for me of the 1984 Olympics was not the individual honors, but standing on the podium with my teammates to receive our team gold medal.
Victory is in having done your best. If you've done your best, you've won.
The obvious precedent for Beijing 2008 was the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Both were showcases for a muscle-flexing nation, although Hitler made an elementary error when he chose not to dress his young National Socialists in lime-green catsuits laced with twinkling fairy lights.
At the Olympics, you there to do a job. I feel you should take it seriously. You should be respectful. You are putting on the red-white-and-blue and going out there to perform for your country.
Aristotle compiled the first known comprehensive list of all winners of the Olympic Games. Which means that quite probably he was sat in a bar with Plato, muttering 'Go on then, give me any year you like and I'll tell you who won the four-man bobsleigh.'
Runners in the western world have a tendency to create psychological barriers for themselves, but Morceli runs at will, with no inhibitions.
Performance enhancing drugs are banned in the Olympics. OK, we can swing with that. But performance 'debilitating' drugs should not be banned. Smoke a joint and win the 100 metres, fair play for you. That's pretty good. Unless someone's dangling a Mars bar off in the distance.
The six colors, including the white background, represent the colors of all the world's flags ... this is a true international emblem.
It has been said that the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games is something that an athlete will remember for the rest of their life. It is true. That moment when you walk into the Olympic Stadium as part of the Australian Olympic Team, is a moment that I will never forget.
There is something in the Olympics, indefinable, springing from the soul, that must be preserved.
It is the inspiration of the Olympic Games that drives people not only to compete but to improve, and to bring lasting spiritual and moral benefits to the athlete and inspiration to those lucky enough to witness the athletic dedication.
The first thing is to love your sport. Never do it to please someone else. It has to be yours.
When anyone tells me I can't do anything, I'm just not listening anymore.
It's all about the journey, not the outcome.
You have to train your mind like you train your body.
Nothing is impossible. With so many people saying it couldn't be done, all it takes is an imagination.
The Olympic Games were created for the exhaltation of the individual athlete.
I am building a fire, and everyday I train, I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match.
If you're fail to prepare, you're prepared to fail.
You were born to be a player. You were meant to be here. This moment is yours.
Never put an age limit on your dreams.
The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.
The 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.'
I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn't in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I'd learned long ago from Charles Riley, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.
The potential for greatness lives within us all.
I didn't set out to beat the world; I just set out to do my absolute best.
In the name of all competitors I promise that we will take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by all the rules which govern them, in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honour of our teams.