My Story

by Daley, Tom

  Even on holiday my favourite place is in the pool! I always spend hours with my brothers, larking about.

  In the evening we went to Buckingham Palace, where we met the Queen. Buckingham Palace is massive and everyone there was so posh. They were bringing loads of food round on silver trays, including caviar. We all looked very smart, too, in our Olympic suits. We were standing in the room where they give out knighthoods, mixing with all the other Olympic athletes, and officials were circulating telling us how to behave towards the Queen to acknowledge that she was there, that we needed to say ‘Good evening, your Majesty’ or ‘Your Royal Highness’. The men were told to nod their heads and the girls to do a small curtsey. We were told not to give her our hands to shake, unless she went to shake our hand first.

  She met all the medallists first and apparently said she wanted to meet the divers next. I was at the front of the queue. She came over and proffered a hand in a white glove for me to shake. She was really small and spoke so quietly, I could barely hear her. She has such lovely features and it was real honour to meet her.

  I nodded my head, greeting her with ‘Your Royal Highness’. She said well done and keep working hard for 2012, before moving down the line.

  Blake was at the end. As she went to speak to him, he did a huge curtsey and nodded his head so much he almost head-butted her. Only Blake could do that! It was so funny. Tonia caught my eye and I was puffing my cheeks out, trying so hard not to laugh.

  Afterwards I was allowed a bit of a break and was able to spend some time with my family. We went to Florida for a week’s holiday. It was great to get away from it all and just be a typical family and we stayed in a great hotel. We went to Universal Studios and I took part in the Blue Horizons show at Seaworld. I did some dives off the board before the show started to get some British people to watch and later signed autographs. I also swam with dolphins and met a killer whale called Shamru. They made the whales splash me with water for some pictures and I smelt of fish for the rest of the day! We got to go to the other parks and spent our time going on rollercoaster rides and having a complete ball.

  It was then back to school and training as normal. I had a good few months to get some schoolwork under my belt and trained religiously at the pool, day in day out. Some of my friends had started having parties and drinking but I didn’t feel like I was missing out. I would go to parties if I was at home and drink Coke or just go to the cinema or to the beach with my friends on my day off. I didn’t mind the sacrifices I was making.

  I could tell Christmas was approaching when I switched on the Christmas lights in Plymouth. Tonia and girl group Bad Lashes (from The X Factor) were also switching them on. There was lots of screaming. We never got to actually touch the switch – Bad Lashes did it together while Tonia and I hovered at the back of the stage. Afterwards there was some slightly awkward dancing with the Lord Mayor.

  At the beginning of December I won the Herald Sports Award for Young Sports Personality of the Year and the South-West Sports Star of the Year. We always have two big tables now and it’s a regular event in the Daley calendar.

  Another highlight of my month was introducing George Sampson at the Royal Variety Performance. It was a great honour to be asked to do that and a great experience for me. I met so many different people: Leona Lewis, Duffy, Take That, Jimmy Carr and Michael McIntyre. The one person who I thought was a bit of a diva was Rihanna. I asked her for a photo and she ignored me. When I meet any celebrities I always think they are much smaller than I imagine them to be – apart from Rihanna, that is, who is really tall! I feel so much more nervous about the presenting than I do about my diving.

  I was thinking in my head, ‘There are Royals in the box, you can’t mess this up. Just read the autocue, you CAN read, so just read!’ It went really smoothly after that.

  I was also honoured to be nominated for Young Sports Personality of the Year again, the award I won the previous year. It was won by paralympic gold medallist Ellie Simmonds, who thoroughly deserved it. Ellie was also at Beijing and the youngest member of the Paralympic GB team, and she matched Rebecca Adlington’s double gold medals in the pool. It was the first time I’d been to the event and it was incredible because there were so many sports stars there and everyone talks to each other about their disciplines. I was starting to have to wear more suits and smart clothes. My first suit was from Next but later Burberry started dressing me.

  I really enjoyed Christmas and had a lovely time with my family. I had four days off but then was back to full training. My 2009 began with a party at our house with my cousins, Sam and Joe. We had a Chinese takeaway and saw the New Year in together. I always joke that in order to beat the Chinese I need to eat like them! It wasn’t a big party or anything but it was just nice to spend some time with us all together.

  2009 kicked off with a very interesting photoshoot at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth for the Daily Mail photographer Andy Hooper. I had a good relationship with Andy and had given him a set of pictures that I had taken during the Olympics of Tonia and me messing around in the Olympic Village, and which he had published with funny captions in the newspaper. Mum had been told it was just in a tank with a few fish but when I arrived it turned out that I was going to be shot in the biggest shark tank in Europe. There were more than 1,000 fish and three twelve-foot sand sharks circling around. They looked absolutely huge. Apparently their names were Emily, Enzo and Howardine, which sounded friendly enough. Dad looked particularly nervous.

  ‘Do they bite?’ I asked

  ‘Not normally, no. But they can,’ one of the shark handlers replied. There were two scuba divers and a free diver there, just in case. Eek!

  It was about eight degrees and I was in my trunks. Andy was by the glass in the spectator area and I was told to dive down and put my hands up against the glass while the sharks were in the distance. I gingerly climbed in. It was freezing. I dived down to where he had told me to and could see Andy snapping away. A few seconds in and I saw all the people behind him take a collective gasp and start pointing and shrieking. I could hear the muffled shouts. I whipped my head round and this huge shark was coming towards me. It was like everything was going in slow motion. My heart was in my mouth. I shot to the surface as quickly as I could and tucked my legs up as far as I could underneath me and this huge shark swam so fast under me, almost brushing my legs. As I panted at the surface, Andy asked me to go down … again!

  ‘THERE WERE MORE THAN 1,000 FISH AND THREE TWELVE-FOOT SAND SHARKS CIRCLING AROUND. THEY LOOKED ABSOLUTELY HUGE.’

  The trainers were there fending the sharks off with sticks. I have never been so scared in my life. They made me go down another eight times. I was so relieved when that shoot was over. The photos looked pretty good, although at first my friends thought it could not be real, but it definitely was.

  February began with the British Diving Championships in Sheffield. It was actually snowing when we arrived and I could not believe how much snow there was everywhere – it was two feet deep. I built a funny snowman with Tonia and Brooke. I was delighted after picking up the gold medal with 517 points. Jack Laugher from Harrogate Diving Club finished in second place. I only had a few weeks before I was competing again as I took part in the Armada Cup in Plymouth. I won all three boards in my own age group and it was fantastic to compete in my hometown. Jack was second in all of my events again. Comedian Justin Lee Collins came to watch the event and I was able to meet him afterwards. He was there for one of his programmes, Justin Lee Collins: High Diver, in which he was learning to dive for one of the FINA Series competitions. Leon was coaching him but he ended up perforating one of his eardrums so wasn’t able to dive, but he took part in a mini competition instead.

  Three weeks later I was working for my sponsor Adidas modelling their new running kit for a photo shoot in their London store. I was getting used to being in front of the cameras. The photographers always tell you to look down and keep your chin up but I never really had to do an
y crazy poses or anything.

  The next day I attended a party for a young girl who was recently diagnosed with cancer. She was going into hospital for treatment but had a special party before then to spend time with family and friends. The whole issue of cancer is so close to my heart, I cannot do enough and was more than happy to give up my time to be there.

  A few days later I was on my way to Qatar for a World Series competition. It was fine but unfortunately I didn’t make the final. If I had been in the other semi-final group, I would have, which is frustrating – it just depends what group you end up in. While the team were out there, we went shopping to this amazing mall that was meant to look like Venice with waterways running through it and the ceiling was painted to look like the sky, which was pretty crazy. We went camel riding and sand duning as well, which were amazing experiences. We also took some incredible pictures of us all doing synchronized somersaults together in the surf. Tonia could not come with us because she had hurt her knee, so we put a photo of her face on a wooden spoon and took her everywhere with us and took silly pictures and sent them back to her. We stuck the spoon on top of a camel, out of the neck of a GB T-shirt and in a random traffic cone. We left her in the desert so she’s probably burnt to a crisp now!

  Changzhou in China was our next stop for the second leg of the FINA World Series competition at the end of March. I won my semi-final with a fab score of 532.95, beating the reigning Olympic champion, Matthew Mitcham, into third place and went one better in the final, where I eventually finished third with a new personal best of 540.70 behind Qiu Bo on 542.25 and Zhou Luxin on 560. I was really pleased with my performance as it was improving.

  The Chinese competitions are very regimented and outside the events there is never that much to do because we are normally in the nontouristy parts. The training facilities are always amazing so we make the most of them, and when we’re not training we try and amuse ourselves as best we can, although Facebook and a lot of other websites are banned by the government there. I know a few words in Chinese now, like ‘Hello’ and ‘Good luck’, so I can talk to my fellow competitors.

  After a break with my family at our caravan in Watergate Bay, it was straight up to Sheffield for the third FINA World Series event. I was really looking forward to competing on home soil and it was also the first event I’d compete in with Max Brick. Blake and I had ended our diving partnership after Blake got punched outside a nightclub three days before we were expected to compete in synchro at the British Championships in February. He had two black eyes and a broken nose, needed ten stitches, and claimed it was an unprovoked attack and everyone hated him after the incident in Beijing. After coming home, he said that he had had death threats on Facebook and abusive emails blaming him for our result. Somehow, I felt that it made me look like the bad guy again. Every time he was mentioned in the press it was always as Tom Daley’s partner and it was often negative, and Dad rang Andy and said in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want me diving with him again as he was a bad influence. A few names were bandied about, including James Milton and Max, and it was decided that Max and I had the best chance. I had known him for years on the diving circuit and, because we were similar ages, we got on really well. It was more like diving with a friend and training was always fun.

  Max and I finished in sixth place in the synchro and in my individual competition I clocked up another new personal best score after getting 10s in four of my six dives to score 540.885. Unfortunately I was nudged into second place by China’s Huo Liang by a mere 0.60 and I edged Qiu into third place by 0.35 points and Matt came fourth. I was learning that the Chinese hate it when you put pressure on them – for them, being right on their tail is the thing that makes them panic and mess up. It was a really high standard so I was chuffed. But it was becoming clearer and clearer that while I could execute my list almost to perfection, I would have to start learning new, harder dives to remain competitive because my degree of difficulty was still lower than those of the other top divers.

  Later that month I went on a plane to Florida for a ten-day-long training camp at Coral Springs. The training went really well out there but about halfway through our trip we had to stay in the hotel because swine flu had broken out. We ended up spending a lot of time in the pool, taking pictures of human towers, doing Superman impressions off the boards and generally trying to amuse ourselves.

  A Different Kind of Challenge

  When I went to school at Eggbuckland Community College, I was quite mischievous, maybe a little bit naughty. I was silly during lessons and a bit of a class clown. I was on report quite a lot for singing in lessons and stuff like that. One day during science class I was walking stupidly, flicking my feet. It was un-cool to do up your shoelaces so they were undone and I was walking up and down flicking my feet like a soldier, thinking I was cool. My shoe flicked off my foot, flew across the classroom and landed in the science experiment that my teacher was doing at the front, splashing her. I can’t remember what was in the experiment – it wasn’t anything too bad – but I could have died from embarrassment.

  One of the girls in my group of friends, Harriet Jones, was the one who was so naughty but she never got caught or she blamed it on someone else. In our little gang Nikita was the one who always got upset when we got caught, Sophie screamed a lot and Alex was the lookout guy. Quite often at lunchtimes, we used to have food fights with fruit across the courtyard. We would bring in loads of apples and melons and hide them in our bags until break-time. It was a total fruit fest! Eventually, they used to ban selling fruit from the canteen and everyone got told off. But we didn’t stop – we used to take our fruit into our classroom, which was two floors up, and wait for the year above to walk below us, then throw oranges and squirty yoghurts at them.

  The bullying crept up really slowly. Lots of people called me ‘Diver Boy’ and that didn’t worry me. When some of the older boys started calling me ‘Speedo Boy’ after the Olympics, I thought it was an amusing nickname. I thought it would gradually tail off but it slowly got worse and worse. Mum and Dad told me that some name-calling and stuff was to be expected and to try and let it go over my head, which I did.

  In the months after coming home from Beijing, if the weather was good we would sometimes go and sit out in the field, but I started to get rugby tackled every time I went out. The first few times it happened, I was annoyed but laughed it off. In my head, I thought that messing around like that was what boys did to each other. But after a while I started to feel nervous and paranoid. It was like I never had any space to go anywhere or do anything and be left alone.

  I HAD TOLD MY PARENTS ABOUT MY WORRIES FROM THE START AND, LIKE ME, THEY WERE MORE CONCERNED ABOUT THE PHYSICAL SIDE.

  In the classroom the bullies did stupid stuff, like throwing masking tape at my head. Not long into the new term I had a media day with five interviews and I let slip that I was sometimes called Speedo Boy and that someone had jokingly said, ‘How much are your legs worth? I’ll break them for you’, before he rugby tackled me. I told the journalist that it was just banter and I thought it was normal. But then of course he published the words ‘Tom Daley is being bullied’, which was picked up everywhere, and with ammunition and the knowledge that it was getting to me it got much, much worse.

  One of my biggest annoyances was that people didn’t accept my sport. To my group of friends I was just Tom, with or without my diving. They understood how hard I needed to train and what diving means to me, but I felt other people thought it was a game, or some stupid hobby, which they could not take seriously. I just wanted to blend in with everyone else and get on with my schoolwork. I’ve always been focused academically and, as with diving, tried to do my best. Looking back, I can see that they were probably jealous, but it didn’t feel like it then. It was hell. I would bottle it up until I got home and then collapse in floods of tears. When I went training, if I was having a bad session it would make everything worse and I would feel awful. Some days, if everything was goi
ng brilliantly in my diving it would make me forget about it.

  Mum went down to the school a few times and tried to speak to the teachers, who said they were sorting it out. But it was hard for them because it wasn’t any individual or group in particular. Sometimes it seemed like it was almost everyone. The younger kids started copying the older ones. In the end they gave my friends and me a classroom that we could retreat to at break-times and we would sit and chat while having our lunch. But I suppose maybe the bullies thought I was getting special treatment.

  IT WAS MOSTLY INSTIGATED BY PEOPLE IN THE YEARS ABOVE, MAINLY THE HARDER GUYS, AND IT WAS QUITE INTIMIDATING AT TIMES. A TYPICAL DAY WOULD START WITH ME WAKING UP AND THE FIRST THING I WOULD THINK WAS THAT I DIDN’T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL, THAT I DIDN’T WANT ANOTHER ROUND OF ABUSE AND NAME-CALLING. I FELT EVERYONE HATED ME.

  As I walked through the school gates, my heart would be banging against my ribcage and my hands would be clammy. I felt like everyone was always looking and pointing at me and being mean. As I was walking down the corridor to lessons someone would try and trip me up, and when I finally got to my desk, someone would snatch my pencil case and empty it.

  My friends would help me pick my stuff up and tell whoever did it to pick it up but they would shoot back, ‘I’m not picking it up, it’s his pencil case.’

  One day someone threw a roll of Sellotape at my head really hard and I had a massive lump. It really stung but I had to pretend it was nothing.

  My friends would help me. They thought we were getting through it together. They stuck with me during break-times and lunchtimes and we would just sit and try to be as normal as possible. I started to learn that as soon as I went outside people would start being idiots. If I went onto the field, I would have to make sure I sat down in the middle of the group, so I could not be rugby tackled. Or we would try and find a quiet corner, where I would cower and hope that no one noticed me.