Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I just stay focused, and I always think about gymnastics. I am just doing what I always do... working really hard and pushing myself to the maximum and keeping myself motivated.
The truth is, gymnastics is a beautiful sport that has allowed me to grow and learn invaluable life lessons: sacrifice, dedication, discipline. Eventually, it led me to my voice.
The coaches today should realize that they are, after all, working with children who sometimes have to stand up to physical and moral stresses which not even all grown-ups could bear.
Up to nineteen seventy six when I quit gymnastics I was very, disappointed because I didn't have anything which is, live with. I didn't have a friend so I didn't have a coach anymore.
Finally I almost dropped gymnastics because I couldn't live without create, and you know, and then, all public in the world start to say, we don't want to see gymnastics without Olga.
In gymnastics, everything is a competition. You want to have your hair look the best and your makeup look the best. You want to be the best, and you want to have the prettiest leotard.
When I was younger, the people making the sacrifice were my parents. It's not a cheap sport. Luckily, I had parents who made a lot of life sacrifices so I could continue in gymnastics.
When I was 3 my parents put me in gymnastics because I was a bundle of energy and they just didn't know what to do with me! They put me in a Tots class and I just fell in love with it.
My parents enrolled me in a gymnastics class when I was three years old, and I just was drawn to gymnastics. I loved it. It was my playground, and I could run around and be free there.
If you want to take it up a step and aim to become a competitive gymnast, you have to be mentally strong and prepared to take on the workload of going to the gym every day, rain or shine.
I have a center at 412 West Chicago Avenue. It's called the Jesse White Community Center and Fieldhouse. It's a state-of-the-art gymnastics facility, game room, weight room, computer lab.
Creative people inspire me. Athletes also inspire me to come alive, especially my daughter, a competitive gymnast who works very hard, as much as six hours a day on her gymnastics skills.
Definitely gymnastics, because I was a gymnast for 11 years. That's my thing. My girlfriend Betty Okino was in the 1992 Olympics and won a bronze medal. She's a gymnast. So I'm a huge fan.
And we lost a lot because of that, and I think this is future gymnastics to separate ages. Because kids can do it more than adult. A woman and adult woman can show more than the small kids.
What I've always loved about gymnastics and one of the many reasons I love watching it now is the combination of skill and freedom it has - the discipline and expression - letting you dance.
I don't like messing up. I think that's just a part of my personality. I don't like to mess up or do anything wrong. When I'm in gymnastics, I like to see my hit percent as high as possible.
In football, you're dealing with grown men. In gymnastics, you're dealing with prepubescent teenage girls. There's a huge difference. At that age, you're not confident enough to have a voice.
I had ridiculous amounts of energy. Mom's like, you're driving me crazy - do you want to try gymnastics? From the moment I started it, I loved it and it kind of was like storybook from there.
Please keep watching rhythmic gymnastics in spite of its situation. If you quit watching it, rhythmic gymnastics will not exist any longer. Your eyes are much more important than judge's are.
I think I always felt a connection to music and to movement. Growing up, I was surrounded by R&B and Hip-Hop, and the closest thing I could find to dance was gymnastics which I watched on TV.
Growing up, I looked up to major league baseball players, and now these young women have amazing, incredible women all across the board, from swimming to gymnastics to softball to basketball.
The majority of people who get in the sport of gymnastics do not go to the Olympics or get a Division 1 scholarship, but it doesn't mean that they can't get something positive from the sport.
All the hands, hearts and minds of the individuals collectively contribute to the team's success. (listen to your team, watch their body language, share your expectations . . . work together.)
It might have been easier to retire, to say my knee couldn't handle it and let that be that. At the same time, the prospect of not being able to compete in gymnastics anymore was heartbreaking.
See, when I went to the Olympics in '76, the gymnastics people knew that I was good, but everybody else, after I won, everybody was like, 'Where's she coming from? Who is she? What is Romania?'
When I was 6 or 7, my gymnastics coach looked at my quads and told the other coach to come over and see my quads. They were big then and still are. But I've kind of embraced it through the years.
After quitting gymnastics in 2000, I was looking for that next thing where I could defy gravity. I was looking for something that had the flipping and the twisting and allowed me to be acrobatic.
First, don't cry. That's the worst thing a gymnast can do in training, because it can ruin your concentration and lead to injury. Second, always place the highest demands of yourself in the sport.
When I look back, I am happy that my mum took me to the gymnastics club. I didn't join gymnastics to become a famous athlete or celebrity; it just happened - I did more than I expected, of course.
A life without purpose is a languid, drifting thing; Every day we ought to review our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let me make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is naught!
Dancing is the personification of music, and music is an abstract expression of the human spirit. But still it's the act of communication, of making one feel. Otherwise it would just be gymnastics.
As long as you've done your best, making mistakes doesn't matter. You and I are human; we will mess up. What counts is learning from your mistakes and getting back up when life has knocked you down.
My parents met during their time at Cal Berkeley while they were both on the gymnastics team. Due to their intense gymnastics background, I started doing 'Mommy and Me' classes when I was 2 years old.
It's a form of mental and verbal gymnastics, and one of the things that appeals to me most about commenting on darts is that no one knows exactly what I'm going to come out with next - and neither do I.
At the beginning, ballet accounted for at least two hours out of six hours of my daily training session. Later I devoted less time to ballet, but every workout of mine included training in choreography.
When I first turned elite in gymnastics, when I was 14, that's when I really became more inspired than ever. I just always kept that in the back of my mind, and always thought about making the 2012 team.
Gymnastics does take great focus and concentration. What I do is look to my coach. He keeps me focused. And I meditate to get myself confident before the competition floor. That helps keep me focused, too.
Gymnastics is the type of sport where you can't take something that gives you more energy. Something may be great for the vault, but then you have the bars after it and you have to be more sedate for that.
I feel there are tone singers, and there are more vocal gymnastics singers. And I think that's amazing when people can do that, but I think there's room for the tone singers. And there aren't a lot of them.
At school, either gymnastics or dance, it was the same. It gave me pleasure to move. And then, when I worked to achieve something new and out of the ordinary, it made me feel good. I felt I had surpassed myself.
The main thing for a gymnast is total concentration while competing. At such moments one has to put everything else behind. I know that other gymnasts can do so with a smile, but I can't. And I don't even try to.
And we realized that it was kind of a starting point for gymnastics, to go professional, and also to just get a lot more of the audiences in the arenas on the off years, in the years that we're not in the Olympics.
I like seeing advanced acrobatics, but I also like to see more than tumbling. It's important to combine the artistry of gymnastics with the tough skills. It's called artistic gymnastics. We should stand by the name.
My sister has kids, including two in baby seats, and she drives a minivan. I had to climb over the car seats to get into the back seat, and it seemed ridiculous to have to do gymnastics to get in and out of the car.
I was lucky enough, when I was younger, to have the chance to do as much as possible, and I found what I wanted to do. I did swimming, gymnastics, kickboxing and the one that took off more than the others was acting.
I knew when I started gymnastics, I wanted to have a lot of fun and eventually go to the Olympics. On the moments where I felt really down, I just remembered, 'You're almost there. Just keep going. Keep working hard.'
I don't think I've ever not gotten nervous. When you work so hard for one special day or routine, you want to perform it better than you ever have. We always say at our gym, If you lose the nerves, you lose the sport.
I enjoy the mental gymnastics that go along with matching voice to picture and vice versa and trying to accent the action as opposed to provide all of the action through my words. And that's really what play-by-play is.
We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces - but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else.
In some ways the ACL tear was a blessing. I had hesitated to return to elite gymnastics after the 2008 Olympics. I told myself I had already accomplished so much, and the road was just going to get harder if I continued.