Lupe Velez was way before me; Dolores Del Rio was way before me, so I had no one. So the only one I could think of that I identified with was this gorgeous creature named Elizabeth Taylor, so she became my role model.

I'm universal. As much as I can get out a 'Firework' with Katy, I can get a 'Lil Freak' out with Usher. Or a 'Lay It Down' with Lloyd. I can get Caribbean as I did on 'Rio,' then go from there to working with No Doubt.

I went to London and was excited to make the team, but to be honest, I was a bit dissatisfied with my performance there, and I'd really like to make up for that in Rio and get the best out of myself on the Olympic stage.

We had to support our player and genuinely felt, like Rio has said, that it was an honest mistake. It is important to know that Manchester United never said, and Rio Ferdinand never said, that a mistake hadn't been made.

You walk off the plane in Rio, and your blood temperature goes up. The feel of the wind on your face, the water on your skin, the taste of the food, the music, the sexuality; Brazilians are very comfortable in their sexuality.

My parents got divorced when I was around a year old. My dad was essentially a nonentity in my life until I got to be about 16 or so. My mom was a flight attendant for PanAm, so I moved all over the world. London, Rio de Janeiro.

I'm amazed by just constantly - there's not a week that goes past where there's not someone in Ulan Bator or Rio De Janeiro suddenly says, 'Ooh, 'Downton' started this week.' You completely forget it's staggered across the world.

In Rio Bravo when Duke makes love to Feathers, the scene dissolves to the next morning where we see him putting on his vest and almost humming. It was subtle, but you knew what happened. Give me a towel and some blankets any day!

I was familiar with that and 'Rio Bravo.' 'Rio Bravo' was what John Carpenter did, that brilliant move of taking a western and turning it into an urban flick. And from there you got, you know, all the cop genre movies of the time.

I advise everyone with plans to visit Brazil for the Olympics in Rio - to stay home. You'll be putting your life at risk here. This is without even speaking about the state of public hospitals and all the Brazilian political mess.

I moved to Manchester United when I was a 17-year-old kid. Nemanja Vidic was five years older than me and Rio Ferdinand nearly nine years, and at the time, they were the best central defenders in the world. They never had a bad game.

Life has changed both on and off the court after the Rio Olympics medal. I have a lot of confidence on the court now and feel anything is possible. I also feel that I have improved my game. Off the court, I do get recognised more now.

But if one could go back in time, I'd love to have been directed by Howard Hawks, who's one of my great heroes. One of the greatest directors there ever was. He directed probably one of the greatest westerns of all time in 'Rio Bravo'.

If I hadn't won at the Worlds and claimed so many ranking points, I would have been struggling for Rio. I'm in a good place now, though, and having the chance to fight for gold in Rio after everything I've been through would be a dream.

While I was making my solo films, RKO was busily trying to get me and Fred Astaire back together. The studio wanted to capitalize on the success of 'Flying Down to Rio' and realized that the pairing of Rogers and Astaire had moneymaking potential.

Johannesburg is weird, because half of it is like Los Angeles. It feels like just wealthy parts of L.A. But half of it is severe slummy, something like Rio De Janiero or something. So it's kind of weird, because it's both happening at the same time.

The swimmers ask me all the time 'is it going to be on telly more?' They want their families to watch them. Not every family can afford to go to Rio or Budapest. And it is nice for the clubs and coaches as well to see the people they have brought up.

If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I want people - boys and girls - to be sat at home watching me alongside the likes of Rio Ferdinand or Frank Lampard, thinking that it's normal, that we all know what we're talking about, and that they're not judging me at home just because I'm a female.

In all, I was in 16 movies, including 'The Bishop's Wife' with Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven; I was in 'Rio Grande' with John Wayne, 'Albuquerque' with Randall Scott, 'Blue Skies' with Bing Crosby and 'Hans Christian Anderson' with Danny Kaye.

I love Sam Mendes, but I went to see 'Spectre' with my kid, and the opening scene of the Dia de Muertos party, with this kind of tropical music, in downtown Mexico City, with all these people dancing like it's the Rio de Janeiro carnival... I had to laugh.

I now have Youth Olympic, Olympic and European Games titles, which is a dream. I didn't fight that well and just scraped through a lot of the fights, but winning is a relief, and it's more points towards the Rio Olympics, which takes a bit of pressure off me.

Rio in four years; I've got more inspiration in the last two, three weeks. I'm sure I'm going to get more in the Paralympics in the next coming weeks, so by the end of this season, I'm going to take a month off, and then the next four years is going to be good.

Maybe I was accepted to Harvard only because of my tennis skills, since I definitively had no great academic achievements. I was 17 and only thought about surfing and playing tennis. I had almost never left Rio de Janeiro and had never been to the United States.

Rio was always going to be on the schedule for me, whether I had won in London or not. Triathlon is one of those sports where the Olympics is always the most important and the most interesting race, and I always wanted to have a crack at Rio and defend my title.

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth's plant and animal population. I hadn't anticipated it would be so loud.

I want to compete in the next Olympics. If I go to Rio, it will be my third time, which is a rare feat for an Indian athlete. For me, Olympics is important because it's the biggest event on earth for a sports person. I hope this time around I come back with a medal.

I definitely remember doing 'The Alamo' with John Wayne and Lawrence Harvey and Linda Cristal. We'd work six days a week, and then John Wayne would invite us down to a little place in Texas called Del Rio, and we would break bread and have some wine and tell stories.

Right after high school, I moved to Rio and took classes to become a technician for a manufacturing factory where you had to figure out how to produce 3,000 pairs of jeans. But in Rio, I was by myself, which was very liberating, being so young. I got to do my own thing.

I also had a chance to play in Brazil for Vasco against Flamengo, the local rivals in Rio. So it is the sort of game the players like to play in, and I like the atmosphere, the build-up, and all the preparations throughout the week. You want to be involved in these kind of games.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 changed my life completely, turning me into an activist. From the air, you see things you can't see from the ground - you really understand the impact of man, even in a place you know well. My work is meant to convince people we can no longer live like this.

I know that when my grandfather crossed the Rio Grande, somebody was there to support him and to fight for him. I know when my dad was discriminated against because he was a Hispanic, somebody opened doors for him, and that's why he opened doors for others. That's what we do as Americans.

When Seoul hosted the Games in 1988, it became a symbol of the Asian Tigers' ascent onto the world stage. In 1992, the Barcelona Olympics represented the unification of Europe. And when Rio plays host in 2016, it will reinforce the growing importance of Brazil and Latin America as a whole.

I'm a big fan of Clint Eastwood, but the Westerns I draw from most directly come from an earlier period in Hollywood. I actually look back at movies like 'Rio Bravo' and others I've liked over the years, and I capture pictures from the movies and use them as a reference for the scenes I create.

When I set my eyes on the gold at the world championships, I was able to maintain that focus that whole day. That's what I aim to do in Rio - my focus is gold, so I can keep in that good state; I can't get too complacent. I can't relax; I can't be content. I need to be 100 per cent switched on.

Rio is an energetic, vibrant place, full of beauty and nature. But we face the kinds of problems any developing metropolis does - with pollution, traffic congestion, poverty. Distribution of green areas, for example, is not uniform. Madureira, the heart of the suburb in Rio, is a concrete jungle.

I can recall back in 1998, in August of that year, when we had a horrible disaster along the Mexican border in the town of Del Rio. At the time, FEMA was the shining star of the federal government. It's now perceived as many to be the dullest knife in the drawer. Right or wrong, that's the perception.

I wish to clarify that I have absolutely not made a decision regarding my participation in the next Olympics. On a personal level, playing in the Olympics would be a huge honour. However, the Games in Rio are still four years away and I certainly won't be making any decisions with regards to participating any time soon.

My father came from Germany. My mom came from Venezuela. My father's culturally German, but his father was Japanese. I was raised in New York and spent two years in Rio. My parents met at the University of Southern Mississippi, and they had me there, and then we moved to New York. I'm not very familiar with Mississippi.

In Rio we built a Center of Operations, a situation room that gathers information from municipal departments and allows us to manage and help decision-making. I can check the weather, the traffic and the location of city's waste collection trucks. Each of 4,000 buses in the city has a camera connected to the situation room.

When I was a kid, my big hero was the number 10 of Flamengo and not the number 10 of Santos. His name was Dida. We didn't have much knowledge about the championship in Sao Paolo or in the south of Brazil. We just knew about the championship in Rio because I am from there. But Pele played for the national team and was a hero.

My grandfather was born in Mexico. And when he was a young man, he crossed the Rio Grande. After that, he served in our military and became a U.S. citizen. He ended up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and that's where my father was born. That was the beginning of my Mexican-American family, where they settled in Las Vegas in the early 1940s.

I was a fan of jujitsu, so that pretty much got me started in fighting. I won a lot of local competitions when I was young and eventually won a ticket to go compete in Rio de Janeiro. In Rio, I struggled a lot in the beginning, living in the gym and not having much to eat, but eventually I joined the Nova Uniao Team and really improved my skills.

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