I had dreamed of being at the Olympics since I was 7 years old.
Walking the runway with Alexander McQueen, I really had to dig deep. You're with Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. I was the first person out on the runway, but I thought, 'I have done the Olympics, I can do this.'
If you offer athletes stipends, then you're into pay-for-play, and that's the ballgame. People should realize that, and they should realize that amateurism never has been a sustainable model for a sports-entertainment industry. It wasn't in tennis. It wasn't in the Olympics. And it's not in big-time college sports.
My whole life has been learning to lead, from my parents, to my education, to the experience I had in the private sector, to helping run the Olympics, and then of course helping guide a state.
The Olympics is nothing I ever dreamed about. I dreamed about playing for Coach Knight and Indiana.
The Paralympics have for too long been considered the poor cousin of the Olympics. It's always run after the main games and rarely gets anything like the media coverage.
Everybody in the Olympics is paid. Lindsay Vonn is going to make a million dollars whether she skis or not.
I borrowed a lot of money from my parents in the years leading up to the 2000 Olympics, and I worked odd jobs.
When Juan Antonio Samaranch said the Olympics are more important than the Catholic Church, I just couldn't believe it. I said to myself, 'Don't let your expression show that he has just made a total ass of himself. Be cool, and just keep right on talking.'
I'm a classically trained painter, and I was an illustrator in New York working with Fortune 500s companies as well as the NBA and the Olympics. I first got into sculpting when I created a sculpture based on a painting I had done for the 1984 Olympics.
At my first Olympics, I didn't have a contract, and I wasn't making any money. After my first Olympics, I was working at 24 Hour Fitness at the front desk. I would go to practice in the morning, run home, shower, grab some food and then go straight to work. I didn't get off of work until 10 or 11 o'clock at night.
I was a crazy little seven-year-old. I used to get up an hour early to watch the big kids train. I thought, 'I must absorb their awesomeness.' That was my goal from when I was seven. I told my coach, 'I'm going to the Olympics.'
I remember standing on a medal podium at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, imbued with a sense that if you won enough basketball games, there was no such thing as poor, backward, country, female, or inferior.
Team GB's success at the Beijing Olympics can, in part, be said to have been made in Manchester. For example, all the cycling medal winners trained at Manchester's velodrome, the National Cycling Centre.
The Beijing Olympics were an exercise in Chinese soft power. Americans have the 'Voice of America' and the Fulbright scholarships. But, the fact is, in fact, that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds have done more for American soft power around the world than any specifically government activity.
My all-time favourite political promise - more a boast than a promise, really - came from former Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, who said in the lead-up to the 1976 Olympics, 'The Olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby.'
Although it is disappointing that softball was not reinstated into the Olympics, we are going to continue to keep growing the sport.
I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics - 'passion.'
The question for every Olympics is whether the giant investment will pay off in the future.
I think South Africa has shown it can host such a big event as the World Cup, so why not hold the Olympics at some point in Africa? Maybe not just in one country but in a host of countries.
Playing college soccer was going to be the top of my athletic feats. I wasn't going to the Olympics. I was a decent player, but it's because of hard work, not because I was Freddy Adu. I wouldn't have a medal from the Olympics if I wasn't in a chair. I wouldn't have gone to the Olympics and experienced the whole atmosphere.
For our team leotards, we get about ten to choose from to actually compete in at the Olympics.
I'm not the athlete I was when I was training for the Olympics in '92 or when I was working out every single day. I have to live in moderation: I work out three or four days a week, and I smile while I'm working out - I really do enjoy it. I work out with my girlfriends and make it a social competition.
I'm a decent table tennis player, but if you were to put me up against any of the guys you see on television at the Olympics, I'd be lucky to get a couple of points.
Since the Olympics in London, people say, 'Greg's won again. That's what we all expect. Of course he wins.'
I definitely have two Olympics in me; I don't know about three Olympics.
The Olympics were produced absolutely the same way from 1960 through 1988. It was always the Western World against the Eastern Bloc. You didn't even have to spend one second developing the character of any of the Eastern Bloc athletes. It was just good guys and bad guys.
I love the Olympic Games. The Olympics are an event that few can fathom but all can enjoy, and that's why athletes work our whole lives to put on the greatest show on Earth.
Yes, I could win the Olympics. I hope to, and that's what I'm training for. But it's really going to come down to me racing on that day... Just being really calm and mature about what the reality is - that's my strategy.
Olympics for me is love, peace, united.
I'm proud to stand beside you as a partner and support Special Olympics - an important program that promotes leadership and empowers students to be agents of change.
I now have Youth Olympic, Olympic and European Games titles, which is a dream. I didn't fight that well and just scraped through a lot of the fights, but winning is a relief, and it's more points towards the Rio Olympics, which takes a bit of pressure off me.
The Olympics are very proprietary about letting others promote and market what's going on, so we shut down for 17 days, and they don't let us do a whole lot in return for giving our players to them. We don't get compensated, and we've never looked for compensation.
We developed a system in Romania that was very successfully continued for a number of years, but I don't know if it was because of some conflict in the organisation or whether there was government interference... but somehow, they have forgotten the importance of raising gymnasts to be ready for every Olympics.
I still can't believe I won the Olympics. That's what I feel right now - completely alive as a human being. It's a really beautiful moment.
My mother never watched me train in Romania. She wasn't allowed, it just wasn't done back then. My training was paid for by the government. My parents were not at the Olympics with me, either. I never expected them to be.
