The mistakes you make and lessons you learn at a young age are what gets you to an Olympic level.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You learn a lot from your first Olympic Games experience. Everyone thinks they're prepared, but you never are.
The spirit of the Olympic movement is great for young people because it teaches them about the training and discipline required to compete. Even if they don't make the teams, they can rededicate their lives to the art of sport, discipline, and physical fitness.
Maybe there's a little girl who thinks she can be an Olympic athlete, and she sees all the things I struggled through to get here. Yeah, I didn't walk away with a medal or run away with a medal, but I think there's lessons to be learned when you win and lessons to be learned when you lose.
As a child I was very involved with sports and I knew at age 9 that I wanted to be an Olympic champion.
The advice I will give my children, if and when they have Olympic aspirations, will be to go for it.
When you're young, you develop ways to win, and you think they will always work, but then you get to the top, competing against the other top athletes, and sometimes things don't work.
As a kid growing up, I was never like, 'I want to go to the Olympics,' so having to pass on 2012 because I was too young didn't bother me at all.
Part of being young is making mistakes.
There's an adage that a lot of coaches have, that I completely disagree with, is if you make the Olympic team too early you become complacent.
When you're on the Olympic team at 15, you don't do anything else. There's no normal social development, and your decisions are made for you.