Michael East's Quotes

Deciding on when to kick is crucial and depends on how the race is unfolding.

I could produce spurts of speed and after taking up athletics I found myself running quite quickly over 400m.

I first discovered my turn of pace when I was playing football as a kid.

If it's a slow race you have to be on your guard. You have to be patient, but I prefer that.

If you go too soon, you can come unstuck with 50m left when the guys are going past you.

If you see swarms of guys coming around you, you have to try and avoid being stuck on the kerb.

It is a natural gift I was born with but it's something I've had to nurture in training.

It probably won't sink in until I've retired from running but I'm a much better athlete than two years ago.

So when you put the kick in and the other runners go past you, it's game over!

Stepping up a gear during any race is not an easy thing to do.

Winning Commonwealth gold was just totally unbelievable.

You have to have your wits about you and think quickly on your feet.

Everyone needs a certain amount of money. Beyond that, we pursue money because we know how to obtain it. We don't necessarily know how to obtain happiness.

You know, some of the good part of blog theory was that blogs would be like diaries that the world could read. They would be spontaneous, whatever pops into your mind, as a diary would be.

And then ESPN fired me. I did not think that was a fitting punishment.

But if you could make that mistake and press the send button and the entire world sees it forever.

I didn't view myself as attacking the boss. I viewed my boss at ESPN as the publisher and president of ESPN.

I don't think there are many larger lessons to be found in sports.

I think professional sports, football, to use it as an example, it's fundamentally a form of entertainment.

I'm a smart guy, I know the history of this issue and why people care about it.

Inevitably, these sorts of things are going to come back to blow up in people's faces.

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.

And if there was something, suppose I wanted to write something really damning or embarrassing about one of the owners, that would really be a problem on the NFL's site.

But by showing us live coverage of every bad thing happening everywhere in the world, cable news makes life seem like it's just an endless string of disasters - when, for most people in most places today, life is fairly good.

Even though Rush is not me and the situations were very different, I think, in the Rush Limbaugh thing, ESPN was criticized for not acting, and you remember that after a couple days of controversy over Rush.

For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.