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I am not going to let Athens affect the rest of my life.

Athens is a great place for me. It is my second home. It's where I won my first world championship medal, it's where I set my world record.

I took a lot of bad things after Athens. I just learnt to deal with it. The problem was beforehand I had this feeling where I was trying to please everybody - I wanted everybody to like me.

Great things are won by great dangers.

I am not driven by any bitterness by what happened in Athens. I learnt a lot of lessons from it and probably came through it a stronger person in the end. There have been a lot of near misses, and that's taught me to keep persevering and that there is a chance it can come right.

It is not I who have lost the Athenians, but the Athenians who have lost me.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

'Greek Street' is a very strange beast. I think of it as 'The Long Good Friday' meets 'Agamemnon.' A way of using those fantastically rich stories from Greek tragedy to take a look at our world and to explore some of the things I think about this world.

The Athenians are right to accept advice from anyone, since it is incumbent on everyone to share in that sort of excellence, or else there can be no city at all.