A Quote by Linford Christie
Some of today's athletes do not have that kind of pride. They left school at 16, have never had a job in their life and are getting Lottery funding, earning money as an athlete.
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I've been crazy lucky that I've never had a day job. I get really close to having no money, then I always wind up getting some kind of great job.
I left school at 16 but I wish I'd gone to university - I think I would have studied English literature. I had a knack for that. But I don't think you have the kind of wisdom at 16 to make that decision.
My school career was absolutely crucial to me. As an endurance athlete, some of the most important years are maybe when you are 16, 17, and 18. For me, getting that right was very important, and my school allowed me to do that.
The way it works in my family is as follows: they first loosen their grip at 16 when you are encouraged to get a Saturday job. I was clamouring to start earning and had been doing cleaning jobs around the house for small amounts of money for years.
I left school at 16 and my mother got me a job as a trainee wine taster. But one day I followed some girls into St Martin's art school and saw a voluptuous woman sitting on a stool being sketched. I decided to get myself fired.
When I was 16 I told my dad I wanted to be a pop star. He told me, 'I'll give you until the end of the summer. If you're not earning money by then, you're going back to school.'
It's the same when you listen to any kind of successful athlete. My older brother has a useful name for them - he calls them lottery ticket careers. I are engaged in what he calls these lottery ticket careers. On the one hand it's very, very unlikely that you're ever going to hit it. On the other hand if you do hit it, you really hit it. You have to be engaged with it, though, maybe you're entire life. And if you never actually do hit it? You kind of jovially lie yourself along the way and recognize that it may produce things outside the hitting it kinds of goods, I suppose.
I left school the day I turned 16, the earliest day I legally could. Determined to follow a life on stage, preferably with some dance connection, I applied for and won a place at the local drama school. I was on my way.
When I left school at 16, I became an apprentice television and radio technician, and was paid £17 a week, which was decent money in 1976. But the job turned sour when I gave myself an electric shock while repairing a television set.
I left Scotland when I was 16 because I had no qualifications for anything but the Navy, having left school at 13.
That's one thing: When I left Notre Dame, when I left every school, what I'm the proudest of is we never compromised the rules, never were on probation, never had any major problems of any kind.
As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn't have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.
I feel bad for guys in other sports that never work a job. Think about it, most MMA fighters have had to do something for money whereas a guy who was an athlete in college sport then went straight to the pros, he's never had a skill outside of sport.
It's tough to be a 15- or 16-year-old athlete competing around the country. There's tension, there's media. I had no idea what I was getting into.
The year I married my American husband, I won the lottery - and I tried to give it to somebody else, because I was already approved - not the money lottery, the immigration lottery.
Anyone can see why an elite athlete would want to leave a small, impoverished country where their skills were effectively uncashed winning lottery tickets. All they had to do was wash ashore almost anywhere else in the world and cash in. Yet the vast majority of Cuban boxers - and Cuban athletes in general - despite that incentive, stayed.
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