Haile Gebrselassie Quotes

You must do as your people do. If my people are poor, I must be poor. People ask me, ‘Why don’t you find a personal coach or a private car?’ I can’t. Then I won’t be part of my people.

You need three things to win: discipline, hard work and, before everything maybe, commitment. No one will make it without those three. Sport teaches you that.

You lose the speed before the stamina.

You know for me when I promise something I want to deliver. If you don’t, you have to disappear.

When I wake up at 5 in the morning is it just to jog? Definitely not, I give it all of my efforts.

What is important is to win.

Some people start a sport just to reduce weight, or some say, ‘My doctor ordered me to run and do exercise’, and for others, they run for completely different benefits. But it is not like that with sport. We need to eat, we need to rest, but also we need to run.

Schooling is so important.

My father didn’t think running was sensible. He told me running is just wasting time.

Like some high official, you have to tell your brain: ‘Do it. Come on. I have to do it.’

Life is a kind of struggle. Life is a sort of fight.

It is not my duty to spend my money in my country, but it is what I want to do. There is nowhere else I would like to invest.

In the marathon a crazy athlete can just keep pushing from the beginning, at a championship you don’t need a time just to win the race.

If your body is damaged, wounded, it can be fixed, but if inside, mentally, you are wounded you cannot fix it, it’s hard.

If you’re planning only to make money and nothing else, you’ll be broke.

If you are a really good marathoner, you have to run New York.

I’m a runner first before anything else.

I wanted to experience New York, to look up and see buildings.

I was the kind of child who worked hard every day with the cows and sheep – I was a very aggressive boy.