by Daley, Tom
Me with my medals I won in Aachen 2005 age: 10 2005
Me with the bent legs doing an inward 1½ on 7.5m age: 10 2005
Me climbing out of the pool with my medals on age: 10 2005
Me doing a back dive straight age: 10 2005
Front 1½ 50m. on 7.5m 2005 age: 10
I’ve never really clicked with springboard. You need to spend time on it and I’ve always preferred the excitement of the higher platforms and the feeling of plummeting down into the water. I was never springboard-orientated, and do not think I was ever really seen as a 3m diver, but I concentrated hard and still qualified for the final. After I had completed my list in the final, I sat on the side of the pool with the chamois round my neck, transfixed by the leader board. My name stayed there and more and more divers kept going but I remained in the top three and eventually, it was only the two Chinese divers who came ahead of me. I could not believe it had happened. Dad was jumping up and down hugging everyone. I could see him in the crowd because he had bought a new, huge Union Jack, which he always waved at every competition from then so I knew where he was in the stands. I felt absolutely elated. It’s the first time that I showed my competitive streak coming through and, rather than buckling under the pressure, being on the bigger stage only served to push me harder.
In the prelim of the platform event, I scraped into the final in twelfth place after a Russian guy made an error. I knew I needed to up my game and, charged with adrenalin, I went for it, scoring a 9. My first 9 in my first international competition! I only missed my reverse two and a half somersaults with tuck off the 7m board and I was beaten to second place by five points.
People started to make a fuss of me. I can remember Andy saying that loads of the other coaches had come up to him and asked him about our training and what his next moves were for me. Then sometimes other divers would ask for photos because they thought I might do well in the upcoming years. I felt fantastic. But I was starting to learn a familiar pattern and after these big events, as soon as I got home, it was back to reality and back to school, homework and training as normal.
After the Aachen competition, I received a £10,000 scholarship via TASS, the Talented Athlete Sponsorship Scheme designed to help athletes they felt could win a medal in 2012. I was the youngest of 107 athletes from thirty-four sports, including a disabled swimmer, a judoist, a modern pentathlete and a speed skater, all of whom were fourteen or fifteen. I was chuffed to get it, but was so young I didn’t really think about the financial side of things. When you’re that age, you just take everything at face value. I never knew how much it was or really understood what it was but I knew it meant that my family could come with me to support me at every competition. While I was taken with British Swimming they have never had any financial support to travel around, so I was happy about it.
Not long after that, I also received my first bit of fan mail from a Chinese diver called Urs Yu Zhou. It was on pretty paper with lots of stickers and she told me she was trying to improve her English so she could write to me more. Dad, delighted at my new-found fame in China, where they worship divers, duly laminated it and put it in the most recent diving file.
I continued competing and going to camps and by May 2005 I had been unbeaten in my own age group since November 2003. I never felt complacent though and wanted to continue pushing myself harder and harder – and felt satisfied when I learnt new dives and perfected old ones. It’s really difficult to be up front. It is much easier to be chasing the top spot than it is to maintain that position because you need to have targets and Sam and Andy wanted me to have goals to reach for. The next stop was the mighty 10m platform, the big daddy of all the diving boards.
Climbing Higher and Higher
I went up to the 10m board for the first time just before I turned eleven. Normally you are not allowed to dive from there until you are at least twelve because of the risk of damaging your growing joints, but I had mastered everything I could off the lower boards and Andy knew I needed to keep learning and that he needed to keep challenging me in case I got bored or my interest started to wane. And he always knew that I could move quickly in the air, so if I got into trouble I could turn myself or correct my position so I entered the water vertically. He calls it my ‘get out of jail free’ card.
CLIMBING UP THE FINAL TWO SETS OF LADDERS I PRACTICALLY CRAWLED TO THE END. AS I GOT FURTHER ALONG, IT FELT LIKE THE BOARD WAS GETTING NARROWER AND LIKE I WAS WALKING ON A BALANCE BEAM AND COULD FALL OFF EITHER SIDE. THE POOL LOOKED LIKE A SHEET OF GLASS. I WAS TERRIFIED.
Andy just told me to jump off and after five minutes of talking myself into it, I leaped. It felt like I was flying and when I hit the water and got sucked under, it didn’t hurt. In the same session I did my favourite dive, an inward two and a half piked off the 10m. As I landed with a rip, I smiled under the water. I felt so proud afterwards and ecstatic about finally getting up there. Before long I was learning one of the harder dives, a forward three and a half piked from the top platform.
At the Central Park Pool, your dive is filmed and played back on a screen behind the boards with a fifteen-second delay. Back then, it was cool to watch your dive from the mighty 10m block, run back up the stairs and do another one and watch it back. Now it is far more useful because we analyse it and see what we have done wrong and how we can improve. It’s got more and more useful as the years have gone by.
There is always the worry of us growing in growth spurts because it puts us at increased risk of injury. At WCS camps I was measured to help identify if I would grow. I was still small at 4ft 6in, weighing just 4 stone 10lb. Being short is a good thing for divers because it means you can move quicker through the air. For a long time I wore strong black wrist supports so I didn’t hurt my wrist joints when I dived, because my hands always take the brunt of the impact. I was limited in the number of dives from 10m I did in each session to about six, so the impact on my growing bones and joint plates wasn’t too much. I still can’t to do too many but often do up to eighteen dives from the top board in one day.
My first big trip away was to Perth for the Australian Junior Elite Diving Championship in July 2005. I had just turned eleven.
We stayed in beachside apartments and one day on the beach there were giant waves that reached over my head. We were all running in and out of the surf, but while everyone else was being knocked over as the waves crashed against the sand, I found a way to dive through them and get out further and further into the sea.
Messing around in the pool in between training sessions with the girls.
The adults were yelling at me to come back and I shouted back that they needed to come and catch me. They tried to run after me but kept getting knocked down!
Outside our training, they tried to keep us happily amused. We went to the zoo, where I saw kangaroos and koalas for the first time. I really suffered with jet lag, though, and some days I would just fall asleep at the table, or even under it. I was so small, the other divers would just leave me.
I shared a room with Max Brick and Charles Calvert, who I have always got on well with. Other Plymouth teammates, like Tonia and Brooke, who are now both fantastic friends, were there too. I think all the other kids probably got a bit annoyed by me because I was so homesick. I would call my mum every night – of course, it was in the middle of the day at home – and beg her to pick me up but she would just tell me that by the time she got out to Australia it would be the morning for me and I would have gone to sleep and woken up for a new day. Looking back, I think it was really hard for her too. I used to sit up all night doing crosswords, hugging my lucky monkey and thinking about going back home to my bedroom in Plymouth, until I would eventually drop off to sleep.
We would eat out most nights while we were in Perth and on one particular evening we were eating dinner at an Italian restaurant.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT WHO WAS GOING TO HOST THE OLYMPICS IN 2012 WAS IMMINENT.
London, Madrid, Paris, New York and Moscow were
the candidates. Kim White, the team manager, kept picking up his mobile phone, asking how things were going. At the end of the meal, his phone buzzed and a hushed silence fell over the table.
AS HE PICKED IT UP, HIS FACE LIT UP. ‘WE’VE GOT IT!’ HE YELLED. EVERYONE WAS CHEERING AND CRYING.
I was the only one not crying. I had to force out some tears. How awful would that be – I’d spent every single night crying up until then and finally we had a reason to cry! I had not really comprehended what it meant at that point. I have since read that when the news came, I started crying because ‘I could foresee my destiny’, but sadly that’s not exactly how it happened!
Snaps from my scrapbook.
Towards the end of the week, I took gold on the platform event with a score of 418.98, with Charles Calvert and his teammate Callum Johnstone taking bronze and silver. I lost my lucky monkey while we were away and was devastated. The day after my individual was the synchro event, where I competed again with Kyle. We were in first place all the way through until one of the last dives, where I got to the end of the board and forgot what I was doing. Next thing I knew Kyle was in the water and I was still on the board, so I just plopped in after him. I got failed dive and was convinced it was because I had lost my monkey. When I got home the sports psychologist tried to tell me that the monkey wasn’t lucky, but just a comfort blanket and I needed to be able to dive without it, but I was still so upset. A few days later, Mum said she found it, but I think she might have gone out and bought me a new one. I didn’t care – my lucky monkey was back!
When I arrived home from the airport, Dad took me strawberry picking so we could spend some proper time together and because he had missed me so much. He told me it was OK to eat some, as long as they didn’t have any green worms in them, and to put some in my pocket and face the sun. As I turned, squinting into the sunlight, he squashed all the fruit in my pocket! You never knew when he was being serious. Later we went fishing in Babbacombe, just the two of us, and he caught a garfish. He then told us we were going to take it home and eat it and I had a strop, saying I didn’t like fish. He smacked it on the wall a couple of times, until it was completely lifeless!
Dad was still working full-time at that point. He had taken over the business where he worked making special-purpose machines supporting large, high-volume manufacturing companies. He would go to work at 7 a.m., rush home to pick me up to take me training and then go home again.
HE JOKED THAT HE WAS ‘TAXI DRIVER DAD’ – BUT HE HAD CAUGHT THE BUG TOO AND WAS DELIGHTED WHEN I DID WELL, ALWAYS CRIED, AND WAS FOREVER KEEN TO TAKE PART AND HELP OUT AT THE DIVING CLUB WHEN HE COULD, WHETHER IT WAS FERRYING US AROUND OR DRESSING UP AS ELVIS AND SANTA AT THE PARTIES. HE WAS ALWAYS BY MY SIDE AND HE WAS PRACTICALLY PART OF THE FURNITURE AT THE MAYFLOWER CENTRE.
As well as carefully keeping all my certificates and press cuttings, he started to video all my competitions with a camcorder and tripod and hung all the medals I won in my bedroom. He measured out all the nails so they were perfectly distanced, although when the windows are open they sound like wind chimes.
In October, I was the youngest person ever to compete in a series of optional dives off 10m, and in November I first started getting interest from TV programmes and everyone started to talk about Britain’s Olympic hopes for 2012. I had wanted to be on the TV after being in a few newspapers so was super-excited. The BBC started following me around for a programme and at first it was a bit weird being on camera, but because I was so young I didn’t really notice and soon got used to it. One day they came into school. The others kids were waving at their mums, pulling stupid faces in front of the camera and being silly. It seemed monumentally important who I chose to be in the classroom with me when the cameras were rolling. Everyone was saying, ‘Choose me, choose me!’ and if I didn’t, then they would not talk to me for the rest of the day.
The media attention was really starting to pick up – and there was a growing buzz about London 2012.
The Daily Mail picked seven athletes as its ‘Magnificent Seven’ – planning to follow us in the seven years up to the Olympic games. The other six were BMX racer Shanaze Reade, runner Emily Pidgeon, gymnast Louis Smith, sailor Giles Scott, judo competitor Jean-Rene Badrick and swimmer Rachel Latham. And not long after I was asked to be part of the Daily Mail scheme, I was nominated for the first time for BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year. As each opportunity presented itself I just wanted to grab it; I loved the attention and recognition for doing something I was so passionate about. Every time something new came along, it came as a surprise for both my parents and me but we lapped it up.
Checking out the Olympic Park. Sadly there wasn’t that much to see.
WE STARTED TO GET INTO A ROUTINE, SO MUM WAS THE CHIEF ORGANIZER, PLANNING OUR DIARIES AND DOING GENERAL MUM JOBS LIKE COOKING AND CLEANING, AND DAD WOULD FERRY ME AROUND TO TRAINING AND ALL MY MEDIA AND SPONSORSHIP EVENTS.
Dad would also help with William and Ben and Mum would give him a list at the start of every day of various pick-up times for all of us and our various after-school activities.
A couple of months later, the Daily Mail took the seven of us for the first time, with our parents, to see the Olympic Park being built in London. Dad and I piled onto a bus, where a special guide talked us through what was being built and where. To me, it just looked like loads of soil and mounds of mud – and the guide was talking about washing the soil in special machines and moving the 20,000 newts from one pond to another. It was when the man got around to the bit in his speech about one area being important for a certain species of bat that both Dad and I nodded off.
DOING MY USUAL TRAINING, BUT THIS TIME WEARING SOMETHING DIFFERENT!
In December, I was named Evening Herald Young Sports Personality of the Year. Andy had won Coach of the Year, Brooke had won Top Amateur Sports Personality and the diving team had won Team of the Year. My whole family came, including both sets of grandparents, aunts and uncles, and loads of our friends – we had about eighteen tickets between us and two huge tables.
DAD WAS SO HAPPY AND PROUD OF ME HE DRANK HIS BEER OUT OF MY GLASS TROPHY. I REMEMBER NOT BEING TOO HAPPY ABOUT THAT.
Around then, Leon Taylor was asked by British Swimming to be my mentor. He was a major diving icon after his Olympic win in 2004 and he was someone I really looked up to. He came to see me training in Plymouth and rang me quite often to see how my training was going. He always asked loads of questions about our competitions, what I was learning and how I was feeling. He was always so enthusiastic and it was great to have someone else to talk to who totally understood my worries.
As the attention ramped up, my diving seemed to get better and better. The first time I was due to compete against Leon was at the ASA (Amateur Swimming Association) National Championships at the Manchester Aquatics Centre in December. It was also the Commonwealth Games qualifier – and I needed 390 points to get to the Games the following year. I was really eager to be competing against Leon for the challenge but he ended up dropping out because of a bad knee and I was really gutted. I was starting to flourish more and more in competitions and for the first time scored five perfect 10s, one more than Peter Waterfield, the British Number One at that time, two for my front three and a half somersaults with tuck, two for inward two and half somersaults with tuck and one for my backward two and a half somersaults with one and a half twists. They were my first 10s in a senior competition. Weirdly, I got my lowest scores for the easiest dives. My score of 399.05 made me eligible to compete at the Commonwealths. I was really happy, although I didn’t really know what it meant and whether I would be allowed to go, but Dad was ecstatic. He was sobbing with tears of happiness and gave me a giant bear hug when I saw him. He was never afraid to show his emotions because he was always very open.
HE WAS SAYING: ‘OH MY GOD, YOU’VE DONE IT. YOU’VE DONE IT.’
I was still really young and new to the international circuit, so in the end it was decided that I was too young to go a
nd that Leon would go instead. I wasn’t worried or disappointed and Dad promised me we could go out to watch. I was on a complete high.
Dad and I went out to watch the Commonwealth Games at the Melbourne Aquatics Centre in March 2006. We were there for about ten days and stayed at a hotel which overlooked the Melbourne Grand Prix course.
I also remember Dad getting this surf and turf meal one day, which consisted of crocodile, kangaroo and shark. Then one day at breakfast, I avoided the sausages because they looked really white and horrible and when I took a closer look they were ostrich sausages. When I told Dad, he was horrified and didn’t go near them again!
The competition crowd was huge and I think I would have been really scared and overwhelmed. In the end, Leon didn’t dive because of an injury but it was good to watch and we really enjoyed ourselves. I was dressed in my red and white T-shirt and hat and cheered really loudly for the Brits. Pete got a silver medal in the platform event and the Brits Tony Ally and Mark Shipman also won silver in the 3m synchro. On one day when we were watching the diving, Dad and I didn’t have very good seats so Tony Ally put me on his shoulders and pretended I was his son and walked me up into the athletes’ seating area, so I had a better view.
I felt so excited about what I was accomplishing and that I could carve out a future for myself in diving.
One day during a normal training session after school, I was on the 5m board doing a dive involving one and a half twists, but somehow I put in two and a half. I did it twice by mistake, went up for a third attempt, thought about it and then came down and went into a panic. I didn’t understand why I was doing it and felt really disorientated. Then a week later I landed flat from 10m. I was going through a really bad patch because I’d grown a lot and that makes it hard to make technical changes quickly, or it can make you uncoordinated because your body is learning to work around a new centre of gravity. My arms felt longer and it was confusing. One day I hit my feet on the board and on another I had landed painfully flat on my back. I put these occasions down as just blips and carried on, telling myself that everyone had setbacks from time to time and it was because I was growing. I hoped it would be OK and I would go back to diving like I had been before.