From a profile of Usain Bolt
When he was younger, he says, the only thing he wanted to do was please everybody around him, from his fans to the media. But after his disastrous showing in Athens in 2004, Bolt sussed out the heartless calculus that underpins critical and public opinion: “I figured out that as long as you’re not doing good, they’re going to criticize you, and if you’re doing good, they’re going to love you.” The epiphany was a liberating one, in that it allowed him to disregard basically everything — from the dizzying adulation to the steroid speculation — that people have thrown at him since then. “I figured it out, and I was like, okay … I’ve gotta put me first. And then I just started enjoying it.”
(entire profile here at Esquire. Via Ronen)
