Daley Thompson
Daley Thompson
Francis Morgan Ayodélé "Daley" Thompson, CBE, is an English former decathlete. He won the decathlon gold medal at the Olympic Games in 1980 and 1984, and broke the world record for the event four times...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionDecathlete
Date of Birth30 July 1958
kids vegetables weight
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.
weight shots stadiums
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.'
kids years people
People don't want to serve apprenticeships any more. Kids expect to be paid and treated really well and all that guff before they've achieved anything. It doesn't work like that. You have to spend five or six years being relatively rubbish and put up with it. For that you don't deserve to be getting lottery money.
athlete careers people
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.
athlete games firsts
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.
thinking years would-be
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.
jobs thinking years
I think one of the things about being a good coach is to recognise when you have given all that you can. In fact there should be some sort of unspoken law that says that a coach cannot have anyone for three or four years - if you have not passed on most of the stuff you know in that time, then you are not doing a good job.
fun dark opposites
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.
champion forethought application
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.
training world corporations
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.
athlete long people
The decathlon takes so long to learn that people who are good athletes don't want to go back to the beginning again.
kids natural
For kids it's natural to be competitive.
athlete people feelings
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.
people boring these-days
Most people doing the decathlon these days are quite boring, so people don't relate to them.