Time & Perspective Quote by Jonah Lomu

The gut-punch here is the whiplash: a man built like a mythic weapon, suddenly measuring his world in the distance between himself and a baby. Lomu doesn’t dress it up with inspiration-speak. He gives you the before-and-after in blunt physical terms, because for an athlete his body is the biography. “Racing around,” “running straight over people,” “having fun” is the public version of Jonah Lomu in 1999 - rugby’s cheat code, the spectacle that made defenders look like props. Then comes the reversal: “so sick I couldn’t even run past a little baby.” It’s not just illness; it’s an identity collapse.

The intent is confessional, but also corrective. Sports culture trains us to treat dominance as permanence and toughness as a kind of moral insurance policy. Lomu punctures that fantasy by placing his decline in the most humiliating, everyday frame possible. A baby isn’t competition; a baby is innocence, helplessness, the thing you’re supposed to protect. Being unable to “run past” one signals a loss of status so complete it borders on the surreal.

Context matters: Lomu’s career was shadowed by serious kidney disease, with a transplant and recurring health crises that played out alongside his legend. The subtext is grief, but also anger at the body’s betrayal - and at the audience’s tendency to freeze athletes at their peak. In one sentence, he forces the fan to see the cost behind the highlight reel, and the human underneath the powerhouse.