Strength and Skill Quotes in Olympics Books

"Jesse, just do what you always do," she said to him in their bedroom on their final night together. "You know you're better than anyone else. Just stay healthy and everything will work out." (Triumph)

When you row, the major muscles in your arms, legs, and back – particularly the quadriceps, triceps, biceps, deltoids, latissimus dorsi, abdominals, hamstrings, and gluteal muscles – do most of the grunt work, propelling the boat forward against the unrelenting resistance of water and wind. At the same time, scores of smaller muscles in the neck, wrists, hands, and even feet continually fine-tune your efforts, holding the body in constant equipoise in order to maintain the exquisite balance necessary to keep a twenty-four-inch-wide vessel – roughly the width of a man's waist – on an even keel. The result of all this muscular effort, on both the larger scale and the smaller, is that your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a rate that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor. (The Boys in the Boat)

On the morning of the meet, I nonetheless awakened with a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. My mind was clouded with self-doubt. Will I be able to perform my skill, even after an injury? Yes, I was physically prepared – but mentally, I wasn't confident at all. The sprain and weeks of recovery had thrown me off. I tried to summon that same strength David once used to battle Goliath, but weakness is all I felt. (Grace, Gold and Glory)

I figured out how to cut through the water, making myself hydrodynamic. Almost every swimmer can do freestyle, but the technicality of the breaststroke weeds out a lot of folks. People either can do it or they can't. There's no middle ground. I might have originally been a butterflyer while swimming with the Red Hots, but after three weeks' working with Brian, I was a breaststroker. Each swim, I coordinated the kick with the pull a little bit more and pulled my chin up while taking a breath a little less.

Then I started to go fast. Really fast. (In the Water They Can't See You Cry)

My breaststroke had very quietly gotten way better than it had been. In practice, I had been working on subtle differences: keeping my shoulders closer to my ears, my hands flatter, my fingertips up when I accelerated forward. (No Limits)

The United States engaged in fourteen games in that summer two decades gone – six in a pre-Olympic qualifying tournament and eight as they breezed to the gold medal in Barcelona – and the closest any opponent came was a fine Croatian team, which lost by 32 points in the gold medal final. The common matrices of statistical comparison, you see, are simply not relevant in the case of the Dream Team, whose members could be evaluated only when they played one another. (Dream Team)

Brooks wanted to abandon the traditional, linear, dump-and-chase style of hockey that had held sway in North America forever. He wanted to attack the vaunted Russians with their own game, skating with them and weaving with them, stride for high-flying stride. He wanted to play physical, un-yielding hockey, to be sure, but he also wanted fast, skilled players who would flourish on the Olympic ice sheet (which is fifteen feet wider than NHL rinks) and be able to move and keep possession of the puck and be in such phenomenal condition that they would be the fresher team at the end. A hybrid style, Brooks called it. (The Boys of Winter)

Where the British boys resembled Ulbrickson's was in strategy. They liked to do exactly what the Washington boys did so well. They excelled at sitting back but staying close, rowing hard but slow, pressuring their opponents into raising their stroke rates too high too soon, and then, when the other crews were good and fagged out, suddenly sprinting past them, catching them unawares, unnerving them, mowing them down. (The Boys in The Boat)

From that crowded little red house in Clarksville, out of an extended family of twenty-two kids, from a childhood of illness and leg braces, out of a small historically black college that had no scholarships, from a country where she could be hailed as a heroine and yet denied lunch at a counter, Skeeter had become golden, sweeping the sprints in Rome. (Rome 1960)

Garvey was my constant companion at the '84 Olympics. He actually did give me strength, because he was the one safe person I could talk to. I never had to worry about him judging me or talking back. It's amazing that a stuffed animal can give you strength, but it did. Many athletes use a small object to focus their concentration. Thanks to Mrs. Lee, my object of choice was a teddy bear, which for some reason the press and the public felt matched my personality. (Breaking the Surface)