Various sports quotes
Climbing
"Why are there handicapped parking spaces at the Lazy Mountain Trailhead? If a handicapped person is going to climb 3,000 vertical feet up a mountain why not ten extra feet in a flat parking lot?"
-Michael Logsdon
"Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it."
-Sir Edmund Hillary
"Because it's there."
-George Mallory when asked why he climbed Mt.Everest
Running
"Roger Bannister studied the four-minute mile the way Jonas Salk studied polio—with a view to eradicating."
-Jim Murray, LA Times
"The mile has all the elements of a drama."
-Sir Roger Bannister
Cycling
"It never gets easier, you just go faster."
-Greg LeMon
Cycling is like a church - many attend, but few understand.
-Jim Burlant
"Nineteen hundred meters up there is completely different from1,900 any place else. There's no air, there's no oxygen. There's no vegetation, there's no life. There's no life. Rocks. Any other climb there's vegetation, grass and trees. Not there on the Ventoux. It's more like the moon than a mountain."
-Lance Armstrong
Golf
"Practice puts brains in your muscles."
-Sam Snead
Canoeing
The first thing you must learn about canoeing is that the canoe is not a lifeless, inanimate object: it feels very much alive, alive with the life of the river. Life is transmitted to the canoe by currents of air and the water upon which it rides. The behaviour and temperament of a canoe is dependent upon the elements: from the slightest breeze to a raging storm, from the smallest ripple to a towering wave, or from a meandering stream to a thundering rapid. Anyone can handle a canoe in a quiet millpond, but in a rapids a canoe is like a wild stallion. It must be kept on a tight rein. The canoeist must take the canoe where he or she wants it to go, not where it wants to go. Given the chance, the canoe will dump you overboard and continue on down the river by itself.
-Bill Mason
Formula 1
"I was already on pole, [...] and I just kept going. Suddenly I was nearly two seconds faster than anybody else, including my team mate with the same car. And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel."
-Ayrton Senna, during qualifying for the 1988 Monaco Grand Prix
"The track is my canvas. My car is my pencil"
- Graham Hill.
Aviation
My definition of an optimist has to be the Luftwaffe F-104 pilot who gave up smoking!
— John Wiley
Nothing said I had to crash.
— R.A. Bob Hoover, after hitting a telephone wire and losing two feet of wing in his P-51.
Last edited by Zeeshan; January 9, 2011 at 10:23 PM..
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