Motivation Quote by Bob Richards

What Richards is really claiming isn’t that he was born better; it’s that he was willing to look ridiculous longer than everyone else. “I won it, at least five million times” reframes victory as rehearsal, not a podium. The number is obviously exaggerated, but that’s the point: he’s quantifying obsession, the private repetitions no camera ever bothers to film. It’s an athlete’s way of saying excellence is less a trait than a habit you keep renewing until it becomes an identity.

The second sentence is the gut punch. He names the usual totems of sports mythology - “stronger, bigger and faster” - then demotes them to irrelevant advantages. In a single move, he flips the meritocracy of raw talent into a meritocracy of attempt. The real separator, he suggests, isn’t genetic lottery; it’s the decision to “pick up a pole” at all. That phrasing matters: the pole is both a literal tool and a symbol of choosing a niche, committing to a strange craft, accepting the awkwardness of being a beginner in public.

“Feeble effort” is the quiet insult, aimed less at rivals than at the fantasy of effortless greatness. Pole vaulting is an event built on a paradox: to get higher, you first have to fling yourself into the air and trust a bendable stick. Richards turns that into a cultural lesson about ambition: most people aren’t stopped by the bar; they’re stopped by the first humiliating inches off the ground.