All pressure is self-inflicted. It's what you make of it or how you let it rub off on you.

During my first Olympics in 1980, at the age of 23, I was physically in great condition but mentally too inexperienced to cope comfortably in the pressure cooker of an Olympic year.

There is nothing so marginal as a party that has been in power for 18 years and slides into opposition. You influence nothing.

The biggest fragility in a project is often just the inability to be able to explain to people why you are doing it, and when you're going to do it, and what's going to happen.

We have to recognise there are very few countries you will take the Games to where somebody doesn't have issues on foreign or domestic policy.

When I moved to Sheffield and went to a secondary modern in the Seventies, there were certain challenges: if you've got a name like Sebastian, you either learn to fight or to run.