Gymnasts

"The possibility to realize a dream is what makes life interesting"

"Nothing is impossible. Just put a lot of effort and dedication because any of you can be the same or better than Yamilet..."

"The fear of failure isn’t an easy thing to sit with, but it’s also what pushes you to try your hardest no matter the cost."

"I just didn’t want to see myself fall back. I don’t want to disappoint my coaches or my parents."

"I grew up going on that beam. If I wasn't in the gym I was always outside on the beam doing extra things because I didn't want to get behind or I always wanted to get better. It was something we kind of cherished because whenever I was bored, I would just go outside and he [father] would watch me and try and coach me even though he didn't know what he was talking about."

"I was just telling myself to do nothing more and nothing less, and just telling myself to breathe because in that moment I literally felt like I was going to puke, I was so nervous. My normal is good enough, so I don't do anything more or anything less, I just have to do what I normally do."

"I focus more on bars and beam just because those are my strongest events, and I just try and maintain whatever I can do on floor and vault. I'm consistently training on all events. It's just I spend more time on bars and beam. I obviously want to perfect those and get those to be the best that I can be because those are going to be my strongest events and the two events that I could contribute to the team."

""I want to do it for my family and coaches obviously, but I also want to do it for myself. I've just been through so much."

"I'll probably cool down a little bit and just focus on what I need to do especially because we're coming to the end. I want to just do the best I can and end it off good."

"I'm probably going to delete Twitter. Instagram is not as bad because I can't really see what people say, but [on] Twitter it's just so easy to see everything. So I'm probably going to have to end up deleting that."

"There were so many times in my bar routine where I could have just gave up and jumped off but I didn't and now I have a bronze medal. This medal probably means more to be than the all-around gold medal did, just because bars is my thing. To mess it up like this, I was just kind of sad about it."

"I felt like I wanted to make everybody else happy because bars is my thing and a lot of people were rooting for me."

"My community supports me a lot. I don’t want to let them down so I go out and compete for them."

"You just can't get distracted easily. If you're having a bad day you just gotta keep going and you just can't be too hard on yourself."

"I’m going to go out there and represent the U.S.A., represent World Champions Centre, and represent Black and brown girls over the world. At the end of the day, I’m not representing U.S.A. Gymnastics."

"I feel like I realized that power after I came out, after the #MeToo movement, and that was kind of scary. But it’s like, wow, my presence is very big in gymnastics but also online, just in the world in general. So I have to be a bit careful about what I say."

"Over the years, obviously since I’ve been so dominant, everybody supported the gymnastics and praised me for what I’ve done in the gym — and not really outside (of the gym)."

"I definitely had the team in my best interest, and that’s why I decided to pull out. I didn’t want to potentially lose a medal spot for them, because the girls were more than prepared to go in and to do their job, which they did. My body and my mind just said no. Even I didn’t know what I was going through it, until it just happened.... Train five years and it doesn’t go the way you wanted. But I know that I helped a lot of people and athletes speak out about mental health and saying no."

"I am going back home in one piece, which I was a little bit nervous about. It's not how I wanted it to go, but I think we've opened bigger doors and bigger conversations."

"It's so crazy. I'm happy I was able to get back out there and do one more routine, especially since I had the girls there rooting me on as well as the guys. It just felt really amazing. I'm proud of myself for the way I pushed through and even learned that dismount that I haven't done in years. And just put up a good set, that's all I really wanted. I wasn't expecting to walk away with a medal or anything, I just wanted to go out there and do it for myself. And I did."

"I decided to pull myself out so if anything, I think by having me not in competition they won the medal because if I would have been in, I would have gotten more lost in the air and had a fall and potentially injured myself and you can't replace an athlete. It could have gone a lot of different ways, but people don't know the rules. They think 'Well, she just quit,' and I'm like, 'No, I don't think so.'"

"Life just happens so quickly and now I have a greater appreciation for life after everything that's happened in the last five years."

"We're not just athletes or entertainment -- we're human, too, and we have real emotions. Sometimes they don't realize that we have things going on behind the scenes that affects us whenever we go out and compete."

"But at the end of the day it’s like, we want to walk out of here, not be dragged out here on a stretcher. I just don’t trust myself as much as I used to. And I don’t know if it’s age—I’m a little bit more nervous when I do gymnastics. I feel like I’m also not having as much fun, and I know that."

"Simone is so good that the rest of us can only hope to finish second to her in the all-around. What else can you do? She does all sorts of crazy things no one else can do."

"She’s the saving grace for U.S.A. Gymnastics, whether they have admitted it or not. Boy, they are a mess. If it wasn’t for her, I really don’t know how they would still be around."

"Women in the public eye and on TV are often scrutinized for how they look so I know how easy it would be to fall into the trap of taking on board this negativity."

"At 6 foot 7 Peter Crouch isn't as tall as he looks."

"The butterflies will be jangling."

"When I sat down to write this book, I was really not keen on the idea of writing a biography that charted my life in a regular, linear fashion.Largely because I thought that nobody would be interested in how well I did in my maths GCSE ( C ) or what my first dog was called (Sadie).But looking back over my life I realise we are all a product of the things that happen to us along the way, even the most fleeting of conversations with a stranger, and by gathering my turning points and life-changing moments together, I have found a way of telling the story of my life - a story of family, love, loss, determination, devastating lows and the highest of highs."

"I think it was. I think growing up very shy, it was easier for me to block out things going on around me and that’s very helpful when you’re on the balance beam and there’s a million different things going on. I just could very naturally do that. And it really became a skill."

"I would say that I figured out a way to kind of combat the negative thoughts. It’s not that they didn’t come in. But I would really try very hard when those negative thoughts were coming in, I would immediately thinnk of two things that were positive and I would force myself to try to push that negative thought to the curb … and it’s not always easy and didn’t always happen 100% of the time but I tried really hard to stay focused on the positive."

"I look back at my career and I am so thankful for all of the small things that my parents did. I think the best thing that they did was make sure I knew that I was loved for being me, not for gymnastics, not for awards but they were going to love me regardless of any of that."

"What my mom would say to me is that people will remember who you are, for the kind of person you are, rather than what grade you get on a test, or if you win a soccer game or a basketball game."

"Your teammates will remember you for the type of teammate you were. I think who you are when you don't win and how you support your teammates says so much more about you than who you are when you win"

"I had no idea how much support I would receive or how much support so many of my teammates and other brave people who spoke out would get"

"The more that we can be honest and talk about if we're struggling, or we're feeling self-conscious, and we can normalize that conversation, I think we'd be surprised how many other people actually feel self-conscious, too,"

"I think for me, the biggest thing was my integrity being on the line, my integrity being questioned essentially. I didn’t win the Olympics with special treatment. I didn’t want to be there with special treatment."

"That was a moment that I was proud of because everyone constantly says, ‘Oh, you’re not strong.’ ‘You’re too this.’ ‘You’re too that.’ But to show that, yeah, I’m not physically the strongest one there, but I still was able to do something like that was a moment that made me proud."

"I wanted to give them that feeling of you are special, you are incredible, No matter what your accomplishments are, you are just as good as everybody else. I wanted them to feel like they were competing at the Olympics and now that they had made it, this is your moment, now just go out there and enjoy."

"Whenever I have a rough day, in the gym or competition, I just know God gave me this talent. I need to use it and not waste it."