Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My cast away this week is Sebastian Koh.

From Olympic Champion to championing the Olympics,

his continuous will to win has powered him through a life tight-packed with drama and achievement.

A multiple medal winner on the athletics track, his style and grace as a middle distance runner,

saw him compare to Nurev. In his current role, delivering a successful

Olympic Games to London in 2012, he might more usefully be likened to Houdini. The nature

of success, he says, is entirely determined by the

individual. There is always an opportunity to rise above a given set of

circumstances and make the world notice you.

In being noticed of course, Sebco, you will also be judged.

Does that hold no fear for you?

Not really.

I guess that the nature of everything I did in track and field was judgment all the time.

So it tends to be the world I lived in and of course one of the you know the ultimate judgments was getting my

you be 40 at 20 past five in a drafty sports hall in cambourne in 1997 when politically a career finish so judgment has never been that far from me

and the certainties though not of politics but certainly of you know of the running track

You know where the finish line is, you know the time pretty much that you've got to be.

Those certainties are not in place with 2012 because of course you've got an often fickle public a sometimes hostile press.

Those lines are always moving with 2012.

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