Education Quote by Lynn Davies

“Hurdles” is doing double duty here: it’s the literal object Lynn Davies built a life around, and the tidy metaphor he’s inviting everyone else to borrow. Coming from an Olympic hurdler, the line lands less like a motivational poster and more like a veteran’s compression of experience into a simple, repeatable frame. He’s not romanticizing sport as salvation; he’s pitching it as rehearsal.

The intent is clarifying and exportable: take the skills that make competition survivable - pacing, composure under scrutiny, small technical adjustments after failure - and apply them to the messier arenas where the rules aren’t posted. The subtext is that “life” often feels unfair because it’s unmeasured, while sport feels fair because it’s measured. Davies flips that: the value isn’t the scoreboard, it’s the discipline of facing obstacles you can’t wish away. You can hit a hurdle, you can fall, you can still finish. That’s a worldview built on recovery, not perfection.

Context matters. Davies came up in an era when elite sport was increasingly professionalized but still steeped in amateur ideals: character-building, national pride, self-mastery. His phrasing (“learning ground,” “best possible way”) echoes that tradition, yet it also nods to modern self-help language. The quote works because it’s modest about what sport can do. It doesn’t promise victory; it promises a training environment where failure is frequent, public, and survivable - and where learning is the only sustainable advantage.