'I'm still terrified of diving from the high board but I'll get the stars to do it for TV': In at the deep end with Tom Daley
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Can the 18-year-old handle the pressure of teaching celebrities to dive on prime-time TV?
'Every time I walk on the diving board I'm terrified. Every single time. Terrified. I can't look down because it's so high. Ten metres is a long way down. I can't let myself look,' said Tom Daley
The country’s most celebrated teenage Olympian, Tom Daley, has a thing about fear. He needs it. It propels him to do what he does.
He says this as he sits in the borrowed office of a health-club manager, munching on fruit and chicken sandwiches (a very late lunch) in the darkening shroud of a London winter.
Most of the time when he speaks, he’s smiling, his eyes locked onto mine in eager, earnest engagement.
He is unutterably polite and remarkably self-assured for an 18-year-old.
But when he talks about fear, his face changes, his gaze shifts and his whole being appears to enter some other invisible zone.
‘You know, every time I walk on the diving board I’m terrified. Every single time. Terrified. I can’t look down because it’s so high. Ten metres is a long way down. I can’t let myself look.
‘You know you’re going to hit that water at 34 miles per hour, and you don’t want to think about all the things that could happen, all the things that could go wrong. It’s scary.’
This is a fairly startling comment coming from an icon of his sport who has been diving competitively for exactly half of his life.
'It's all about confronting fear. There are two sides to diving. There's the physical side - the strength, the agility, the actual physical ability - and then there's the psychological side,' said Tom
A man who was one of the faces of the 2012 Olympics, whose boyish good looks and perfectly honed body have given him a pop-star status in the typically unglamorous world of swimming pools, pikes, chlorine and hi-tech goggles.
But Daley, who, aged 14, was the youngest participant in a final at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and went on to win gold at the 2009 World Championships, two golds in the 2010 Commonwealth Games and a bronze at this summer’s Olympics, is deadly serious.
‘The first time I ever dived I was seven years old,’ he says. ‘I stood at the end of the board crying. I felt like I just couldn’t move. One of the coaches watching me then said that I would never, ever be a diver.’
But eventually he did it, and every day he kept coming back to the pool to do it again.
‘I started training and I learned what I physically needed to do.’
He then won his first ever medal in the National Novice Championships in 2003.
He pauses. ‘But when I was 12 I had a dive that went wrong. It totally put me back. When I had to get back on the board I felt like I needed to crawl along it so I wouldn’t go off the sides. It was everything I could do to stop myself crying.’
But again he dived. He nods and meets my eyes again. The obvious question has to be, why on earth does he put himself through all this? Why would anyone want to do something that reduces them to tears and trembling?
He leans forward. ‘But that’s the point,’ he says. ‘It’s all about confronting fear. There are two sides to diving. There’s the physical side – the strength, the agility, the actual physical ability – and then there’s the psychological side.
'You have to gain that psychological strength, and what you learn to understand is that it’s the bad things that happen to you that actually give you that.
‘It’s about standing up to it, dealing with bad things, learning – like I did when I was 12 – that the only way to get over something is to keep on going, to keep pushing through.’
'I'm not the average teenager. I want to dive, I want to be good at it; I'm a perfectionist, I'll work as hard as I can to do the best I can. But it involves a lot of sacrifices,' said Tom
But is there any actual enjoyment in doing what he does? Now he laughs.
‘Look, I’ve had injury after injury. I’ve hit my head (he pulls back his hair to show me two scars), I’ve torn my triceps, damaged the ligaments in my thumb, hurt my back and shoulders – so many things.
'But… there’s no other feeling like falling through the air. There’s no other rush like it. In life sometimes you just need fear so you can face it. Every single time I dive I feel so completely alive. It’s just how it is.’
Where does his mind go when he’s up there on the board dealing with his terrors and surrounded by the ear-splitting screams of his hysterical fans – the ‘Dalites’, as his team call them? (At the last Olympics he had to repeat his first dive after being distracted by excessive flash photography.) He shakes his head.
‘You try and think of nothing but the process. You don’t hear any noise; you hear your feet on the board and nothing else.
'You go through every tiny step of the process you’re about to do, and you know you can only try and control what is possible to control and there’s nothing you can do about the rest.’
It’s a fascinating insight into the mind of a sportsman for whom success has come at a price.
At his local school he was savagely bullied by other kids, who taunted him for his obsession with diving and repeatedly rugby-tackled him and threw things at him. He would often return home in tears.
Tom celebrates finishing third in the men's 10m platform diving final at London 2012
His parents met with teachers, but still the bullying continued, until he moved – assisted by a sports scholarship – to Plymouth College in 2009.
‘A lot of kids go through that experience, and it’s miserable,’ he says.
‘I’m not the average teenager. I want to dive, I want to be good at it; I’m a perfectionist, I’ll work as hard as I can to do the best I can.
'But it involves a lot of sacrifices. You have to train every day (he trains four to six hours daily), you can’t go to the cinema midweek, you can’t go to parties on Saturdays, I don’t drink, I’d never do drugs.
‘As a competitor I have a form to fill out saying where I am at all times of the day, and I can be drug-tested at any time.
'It hasn’t put me off drugs, because I’ve never had an interest. It’s something I don’t understand, and to be honest, if I like someone then find out they do drugs, I lose all respect for them. All these things make me different, I guess.’
He’s certainly no average teenager. He doesn’t have, and never has had, a girlfriend.
‘It’s simple: I don’t have time for one,’ he says.
He has, however, had a proposition from someone whose calendar adorns his bedroom wall: Cheryl Cole.
‘She tweeted me after the Olympics asking for a diving lesson, but it’s not happened yet. Obviously I can’t imagine anything better; I’m just waiting for the call.’
He’s the same age as the world’s most famous teenager, Justin Bieber, but utterly different in terms of behaviour. There’s no shifting of feet and avoidance of eye contact, no low boredom threshold.
Asked to pose underwater in a suit by the photographer, he repeats moves again and again, jumping in and out of the water without a complaint, listening closely to every instruction, intent on perfect execution each time.
For a man used to winning, Daley has suffered great loss.
Last year, just a few days after his 17th birthday, his father, Rob, died after a five-year battle with brain cancer. He was just 40. He was also his son’s greatest supporter and mentor, giving up his job as an electrician to act as driver, companion and ‘best friend’ at every single competition Daley entered.
In 2009, when his son had just become world champion, a tearful Rob interrupted a press conference to ask his 15-year-old son for a hug. Even at the time, Daley understood it was more poignant than embarrassing.
Tom in February 2008 with his late father, Robert, who was his greatest supporter and mentor. He died last year after a five-year battle with brain cancer
‘I miss him,’ he says simply. ‘But I know what I did was a massive boost for him. He came to every training session, every event with me. Then when he was ill and I’d be called home, he’d be the one telling me to go to the pool and train.
‘I come from a pretty big family and everyone was there for all of us. Throughout everything I never missed one training session, which he was proud of.
'It was his dream I got to the 2012 Olympics and it was so sad he never saw me there, but he was in my head all the time.’
He thinks about him a lot.
‘There’s one thing that my dad said which I try to do, which is to do a good turn every day, whether it’s holding open a door or just stopping to chat. That’s when I think of him.’
After his death, Daley had to endure a Twitter troll taunting him over his loss.
His reaction was to hit back publicly, retweeting the troll’s first message with the comment, ‘After giving it my all… you get idiots sending me this.’
He’s not a man who’s inclined to back down. Indeed, Daley is very much a role model. And it’s hard at times to think of him as a normal teenager. He’s currently studying for his final A-level modules and considering enrolling at university. He sounds less than half-hearted about the idea, though.
Tom with Peter Waterfield in the men's synchronised 10m platform diving at the Olympics
‘I’d quite like to do Spanish and Italian, but I don’t think my university experience would be the same as most people’s.’
I presume he means because he doesn’t drink and party and because he’s too much of a celebrity to blend in with the crowd. He looks thrown.
‘No, that isn’t an issue. Not drinking doesn’t bother me. I didn’t even have a drink on my 18th birthday because I was competing. I didn’t drink anything for another week.
'Uni won’t be the same because I’ll have to spend so much time training, I won’t be able to get involved. I’m still thinking about it, but I just have a lot of reservations.’
There’s also the small distraction of an impending TV career.
From next Saturday he’s starring in Splash!, a Strictly-style show hosted by Vernon Kay and Gabby Logan in which celebrities are taught to dive and must compete in front of a panel of judges. Daley will act as a mentor.
ITV has high hopes for the programme. Daley was chosen for his ‘likeability factor and expertise’.
‘What Tom has done is make us realise what an incredibly exciting sport diving is,’ says an ITV spokesman.
His decision to do the show will inevitably lead to sniping from some quarters, but it will certainly get more people out there on the boards of their local swimming pools.
‘That for me is a huge thing,’ he says. ‘And the idea of presenting is incredibly exciting. Realistically speaking, I may have another ten or 15 years in diving, but you never know what’s going to happen.
'I’d love to be at the next Olympics and maybe the one after, but I’d also love to think I have something else in my future.’
He’s a fan of reality shows, from The X Factor to Strictly.
‘I’m going to be honest, but I’m not going to be like Simon Cowell,’ he says with a grin.
‘The idea is really exciting to me. I think every kid wants to be on TV. Ant and Dec are my ultimate idols, but to think I can do a show where it’s actually entertainment but it’s about diving – that’s amazing.’
Does he have any say in the choice of celebrities? He shakes his head.
‘I know people I think would be good. Gymnasts, dancers – maybe Jason Statham; he was a diver before he was an actor.
'Personally I’d like to see Cheryl up there, or Louis Walsh, because I think he’d be hilarious. I’d also like to see Barack Obama dive, because I think he’s definitely got the psychological strength to do it.’
He has in the past been criticised for being too showbiz. Back in February he posted a video of himself and his Team GB pals lip-syncing to LMFAO’s Sexy And I Know It (which went on to get over three million hits).
Making an undressed appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show in August, alongside Kelly Brook
Shortly afterwards, Alexei Evangulov, British Diving’s performance director, slammed him for devoting too much attention to commercial distractions, suggesting that he risked becoming the next Anna Kournikova.
However, Evangulov went on to praise him after a stellar return to form – and then he silenced all critics with the Olympic bronze.
Like it or not, though, Daley is a bona fide celebrity, with definite celebrity traits.
He waxes his chest every four weeks – not for any aerodynamic advantage, but, he says, ‘because your body is always on show and it looks a bit better’.
He knows a couple of the guys from One Direction.
‘I met Liam at a party after the Olympics and Liam and Niall at James Corden’s wedding.’
He says this easily, then admits that at times he feels like a fish out of water in such glittering company.
‘I think of myself as very normal. In Plymouth no one really bothers me.
'There are times where girls come over, and there have been times when I’ve been out somewhere totally random, like in the middle of a moor, when girls have literally come and screamed in my face. That’s pretty embarrassing actually. What do you do to that? You just want to disappear. It’s pretty amusing for my friends, but not that great for me.’
At James Corden’s wedding he sat ‘just staring around thinking, “Oh my God, there’s so-and-so from the telly.” And then they were all coming over to me saying, “Well done.”
'Halfway through the night, I was still sitting there, and all of a sudden these arms wrapped round me and this blonde hair was all over my face, and this Aussie accent was saying, “Well done, well done, you are amazing.” I was patting her on the back saying “Thank you”, and when she emerged it was Kylie Minogue. I mean, Kylie Minogue. That was pretty special.’
Daley may be fascinated by the entertainment world, but his family remains his number one priority.
He’s very close to his mother, Debbie, and as the eldest of three brothers is clearly conscious of being the man of the family.
Asked whether his brothers – Will, 16, and Ben, 13 – are proud of him, he grins.
‘Actually, not at all. They’re deeply unimpressed by what I do and find diving extremely boring. They’re very normal, not-super-well-behaved teenage boys.
‘Yes, it was tough for them when my dad died, but we really have this incredible support network and everyone dealt with it as well as they could.
‘I’m not a hero at home. Most of the time they’ll sit around sighing, saying “Tom’s rubbish at diving” or “Tom can’t dive” – that sort of thing.’
They were, however, there watching him every day at the Olympics. And they cheered. As they should.
‘Splash!’ starts Saturday January 5 on ITV1
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2253718/Tom-Daley-Im-terrified-diving-high-board-Ill-stars-TV.html#ixzz2GZQFYOC3
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