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Mo Farah
23 quotes
“We didn’t even have a football. We had socks, lots of socks, and a plastic bag wrapped around them.I imagined this huge place in the street with the lights. When I went back in 2003, I realised the reality was it was this little village.”
“No child should have ever gone through what I did, I don’t think any human should be treated like that. I was not allowed to do anything I wanted to do, or hang out with other kids. Yeah. To have gone through what I did was not easy, and is still not easy.”
“I didn’t have an interest in running, though. I was like: I’m good at running and it’s fine, but I wanted to play football. My PE teacher, Alan Watkinson, could see how far ahead I was of the other kids just in warm-up. I’d finish my second lap and they’d still be on their first.”
“I was scared and I packed my bags. I knew when I told him there was no going back.”
“She’s not really my aunt. She’s a distant relative. She was very good to me, she put a roof above me when I had no family and she looked after me.”
“l thought: one day, I’ll play for a club.”
“The first proper Olympics I engaged with was Sydney in 2000, watching Cathy Freeman in the 400m and Haile Gebrselassie and Paul Tergat in the 10,000m. That’s the moment I went: I want to be Olympic champion. I was in sixth form.”
“I remember being on the plane for hours and something clicked in my head. If these are the rewards, you go to Disney World Florida, you go to training then you go on all these rides, then athletics is good. I thought: I want to become an athlete, I want to fully focus on running, not football. At that moment, I started to train more, to improve, I won the English schools [cross-country championships], I went to the European cross‑country under-20s and came second. I did the world cross-country when I was 17.”
“Listen, when you haven’t had the life and you’ve been kept in that room, not being able to do anything, at some point you’re going to let go and lose the plot. And I did. When I went to college I was like: I’m free, I can have my own room, my own friends, I can go and do stuff, and I did go a bit crazy.”
“They were sleeping, eating and training, sleeping, eating and training. And I said to myself: if I’m ever going to have any chance of beating these guys, I’m going to have to change something.”
“I thought: as long as I run, that’s it. I didn’t know any better,” he told me in 2012. Did the Kenyans say anything to him? “No, but they’d try to wake me at 6am and I’d say: ‘OK, OK,’ then just go back to sleep.”
“I was thinking: if my running doesn’t work, what am I going to do? Then when I got better I said to myself: I just want to be a full-time athlete, train, give it all and be smart.”
“I wasn’t in control of my body. I knew with four laps to go there’s a good chance I could get a medal. So hold it, hold it, and each lap, as it gets shorter and shorter, Kenenisa [Bekele, the defending champion] is still there. And going into the last lap, I’m [thinking] hold the lead, hold the lead, and at that point the whole stadium is going crazy. Crazy. The finish cameras were moving because of the noise. They’ve never had it like that before.”
“If you know my story now, you probably understand a bit more.”
“You can’t forget what someone contributed to your career. And he gave me self-belief, to make me think I belonged here.”
“It was hard for me to deal with it when you’re under constant attack.”
“I was that boy who was [under attack] by 20 guys who had the talent to be a journalist. I could have dealt with it better by having a bit more understanding.”
“I didn’t understand that it wasn’t about me. When people first started to talk about him, it would have been easier to get out of that situation.”
“Overall, it showed the kind of person I am. Loyal. I always like to give the benefit of the doubt.”
“There is not even a hint of a smile. I am lost for words. Are you joking, I ask. He smiles, gently. No, genuinely. You could say two hours five minutes is decent, but if you compare my time with the best guys what they’re running .”
“As a victim, you never stop blaming yourself, You always live with it.”
“When I started talking about it, they were going on 10, and when I was a nine-year-old there’s me with a new world.”
“Families mean everything to me. That’s why you saw my oldest girl on the track with my wife in 2012, because they’re part of me. And I always promised myself: whatever I didn’t have as a kid with family, my family would have.”
Mo Farah (born 1983) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘I went a bit crazy’: Mo Farah on rebellion, love, ruthlessness – and being forced to live a lie, The Guardian (June 13 2004)