Skip to main content

Motivation Quote by Lynn Davies

"As a youngster, I enjoyed sport and my ambition was to be a great sportsman"

About this Quote

There’s a disarming plainness to Lynn Davies’ line: no mythmaking, no tortured backstory, just the clean origin story of a life organized around motion and desire. “As a youngster” puts the emphasis on instinct rather than strategy. Sport arrives first as pleasure, not branding, and the ambition that follows feels almost inevitable - the private thrill hardening into a public aim.

The phrase “enjoyed sport” matters because it refuses the modern script where greatness is supposedly engineered from day one by parents, programs, and hyper-specialization. Davies frames aspiration as something that grows out of play. That’s also the subtext: elite performance, at least in his telling, starts as joy before it becomes work. The sentence is modest, but it quietly argues against the culture that treats youth athletics as a pipeline and childhood as a training camp.

“Ambition was to be a great sportsman” is old-fashioned in the best way. Not “a champion,” not “the best,” but “a great sportsman” - a word that carries a moral charge: character, composure, respect for the event and the opponent. Coming from an athlete whose era prized amateur ideals even as global sport professionalized, it reads like a self-portrait and a value statement. He’s not just recalling what he wanted; he’s signaling what kind of greatness he believes still counts.

Quote Details

TopicSports
SourceHelp us find the source
More Quotes by Lynn Add to List
Lynn Davies: childhood play and sporting ambition
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

Lynn Davies

Lynn Davies (born May 20, 1942) is a Athlete from United Kingdom.

9 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

Merlin Olsen, Athlete