Winners and losers in Beijing?

When Baron Pierre de Coubertin instigated the modern Olympic movement in 1896, he summed up his ideal in the words 'The important thing in life is not the victory but the contest; the essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well'. Later sportsmen have not always agreed with this: Damon Hill said 'Winning is everything. The only ones who remember you when you come second are your wife and your dog'.

Over the years there has been considerable disagreement about the value of sport. The writer George Orwell commented 'Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play... It is war minus the shooting', but that unlikely football player the French existentialist Albert Camus famously said 'What I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport'. The Australian swimmer Dawn Fraser 'hated the easy assumption that girls had to be slower than boys'.

The athletes themselves have described their experiences in different ways. The American Edwin Moses said 'I don't really see the hurdles. I sense them like a memory', while the British long-distance runner Paula Radcliffe thought it was very simple: 'All you need to run is good shoes'. The Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen looked back to the 1940s: 'When I competed, no one ever thought it would be possible to make money from doing something you enjoyed so much'.

Ultimately, every competitor wants to be able to say with Muhammad Ali: 'I'm the greatest'.

Whether you are a sports fan or a sports hater, you can find a vivid picture of today's wider world beyond the Beijing Olympics in the new paperback edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations.