Tom Daley has the large lumberjack hands and size 11 feet of a very tall man. There must be height lurking somewhere in the diver’s genes, because his younger brothers are 6ft 5in (1.96m) and 6ft 3in, while his uncles are 6ft 5in and 6ft 7in. But Daley measures in at 5ft 10in, one inch shorter than his own grandmother. “Yeah,” he says, turning over the saucer-size palms to reveal knuckles that protrude like acorns, “I think in some ways this sport stunted my growth.”
He explains: “I started lifting weights when I was nine years old, for the diving. And that early impact… It’s like with gymnasts, it keeps everyone quite small.” Daley shrugs, an Olympian whatevs. This is just one of those weird compromises – inexplicable and unacceptable to the rest of us – that Olympic athletes tend to make.
Daley is 25 now, a veteran of Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016, and poised to compete in a fourth Games in Tokyo this summer. Had he grown any taller as a boy, he points out, he would not have made it as far as that first teenage trip to China. “To do what I do, you can’t be big and bulky, or you spin slower in the air.” He dives on his own and as part of a pair, from a fixed (not a springy) platform that hangs 10 metres over the water. To twist and turn and wheel in the air before he hits the surface, he needs a lot of compact strength. “If you’re looking at us without our clothes on, we’re powerful but not overly muscular.”
As it happens, I have been looking at Daley without his clothes on. We meet one day in the gaps around his many fitness and training sessions, in a part of east London that isn’t far from his usual pool. Daley, who has neatly trimmed dark hair and a large five-ring tattoo on the inside of one arm, shakes my hand while wearing barely-there swimmies. I ask him when this started to feel normal, meeting new people while wearing just a few inches of shiny Lycra. As a rule, he says, strangers don’t tend to recognise him in clothes. “Sometimes they say, ‘Where do I know you from?’ And they run through the options. Actor. Singer. The penny drops when they think of me in my pants.”
He changes into a dark tracksuit and we set off on a walk around the area, strolling around St Katharine Docks, taking in the view through the boat masts to Tower Bridge and the city beyond. Later this afternoon he’ll head home to his husband, the screenwriter and activist Dustin Lance Black, and their 20-month-old son Robbie; but before that, with Tokyo looming, he has another training session to get through. He’s due to have a scan on a hurt hand. It’s around now in any Olympic year that everything starts to narrow and get more focused for athletes with designs on a medal, which is to say, all of them.
Four years ago, Daley had a hugely disappointing Rio. He had already won a bronze medal in the pairs event (his second bronze, after London) and looked a favourite to win gold, after setting a new Olympic record in the first round of the individual event. A friend of mine was poolside on semi-finals day in Brazil, when all it took was a few low-scoring dives and Daley was eliminated without even making the final. “He looked shellshocked,” my friend said. “Haunted. He just couldn’t fathom why he’d performed so underwhelmingly.”
There were logistical difficulties for the divers and swimmers in Brazil, including a lack of places to train outside the cramped Olympic Village (and a pool where the water, one day, turned a lurid green). But these problems affected everybody. Daley’s bad day was hard to account for. As we walk, I ask him if he’s come any closer to fathoming what happened.
“To this day, I don’t know exactly,” he says. “I was 22, at my peak. I was mentally prepared. In the best physical shape I’d ever been in my life. I had the experience, too, because this was my third Olympics and I knew about the pressure. I felt, for the first time, like a professional athlete; like this was serious business. I’d stopped drinking alcohol for two years! I’d slept nine hours every single night. I hadn’t cheated, ever, with food, not even ice-cream.”
And then? It can be over so appallingly quickly for an Olympian. Quickest of all for platform divers such as Daley, who fly through the air for less than two seconds before the splash. Daley explains that he simply woke up on the day of the semis feeling off. “There was just something. You know when you wake up and nothing will click? You can’t seem to get going? It was weird. Almost like I wasn’t in my own body.”
I ask him if he spoke to his husband or family that morning, to try to settle himself. Oh, he says, no time. “You wake up at 6am, have breakfast and get to the pool for 7.30am, warm up and start competing at 10.” It was over by brunch. I say something about the cruelty of this, a year of work condensed into a day, and Daley laughs darkly. “Four years of work. You can feel good for four years. And it comes down to one day. A few seconds, really.”
So why go back for more?
Daley has a quick-fire way of talking as soon as the thoughts come, and gives an interesting answer that seems to capture the paradox of Olympic competition. We make a really big deal of the top three winners, and largely discard the rest of the field. All of them have put in the years. Some of them might just have had an off-day at the worst possible time. But, Daley explains, “that’s the thrill of it. As well as the worry of it. As well as the excitement of it. As well as the devastation of it.”
Tom Daley has long been a sort of Peter Pan figure in the public imagination, a small boy and an old soul. “I’ve had to grow up quickly,” he says. “At the same time, you get snapshotted at the age you became well known. There’s that never-grew-up thing.” He was born in Plymouth, the eldest of three boys to Rob and Debbie. Aged seven, he was at the local pool when he saw older boys hurling themselves off the high board. After a couple of years of diving lessons, Daley was entering tournaments and beginning to tailor his body for competition.
He was 14 when he went to Beijing to compete in the pairs event, the youngest member of Team GB. It hardly mattered that he finished eighth, because – look at that little kid with braces in his union jack trunks! He was a sensation in the UK, and returning to school after that summer was tricky. The news cameras were there. Bullying hadn’t been a problem before, but it was now. Daley’s parents moved him to the private Plymouth College, where he was enrolled on an athletic scholarship.
He did better there, socially and academically, and he credits a lot to sport. “I said I thought sport stunted my growth in terms of height,” he says, “but in so many other ways it made me grow as a person. I travelled alone to Australia when I was 10. I became independent. Driven. I learned about time management because, when you don’t have much time, you get more done.”
When I mention to Daley how fast he’s been talking, he pauses, laughs and says: “I’m always go-go-go. My husband says, ‘Slow down. Sit down.’” He has trouble relaxing sometimes. “Our son will be having a nap and I’ll think: ‘Laundry.’ After that I’ll think: ‘Now what? Robbie’s gonna be asleep for another whole hour! Oh, I know, I’ll bake a cake.’”
About a decade ago, Daley says, he dealt with tragedy in his life by keeping on the go like this. His father, Rob, was a charismatic figure who went to most of the international diving tournaments, bringing along a big union jack to wave from the stands. When Daley was named the Plymouth Herald’s Sports Personality of the Year, Rob celebrated by drinking beer out of the trophy. Still in his 30s, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. When Rob died in 2011, Daley says now, “All I wanted to do was get back on the diving board – not stop. I didn’t take any time away from the pool.”
Does he regret that?
“I look back and think: did I allow myself any time to grieve? People lose people in so many different ways. Slowly, quickly, unexpectedly. Everyone deals with that differently. I left my dad’s wake early, to compete at the national championships.” Daley says it took him a while to recognise delayed grieving for what it was. “I was so focused on the London Games in 2012. Then it happened, and I had a bronze medal around my neck, and I looked into the audience – Mum was there, my brothers, no Dad. I couldn’t see the big flag he always brought. This was the moment we’d been working towards – and it hit me right then.”
After London, he says, he went into a slump. “Oh my God, I wanted to quit. I never wanted to dive again. Everything had been about the 2012 Olympics. It was: 2012! 2012! 2012! And then it was over, and everything after it looked unknown to me.” He didn’t feel he could express this to people, not so much the specifics of a depression, but why he should feel depressed at all. “I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. If you try to explain, people quite understandably say: ‘What are you talking about? You’ve just won an Olympic medal. What do you mean you’re sad? What do you mean, you don’t know what to do with yourself?’”
In 2013, during his slump, Daley was on a visit to the US when he was invited to join a friend at a party in a Los Angeles restaurant. “I walked in and clocked him. Locked eyes. It was weird.” The man he’d clocked was Dustin Lance Black, a California screenwriter and gay rights activist. Black was 20 years older, and across a diverse career had helped overturn discriminatory laws in the California constitution, as well as winning a screenwriting Oscar for Milk, his 2008 biopic about campaigner Harvey Milk.
In the restaurant Daley quizzed Black about the movie’s success. “He said it was amazing, a whirlwind-like two weeks when you’re everything. And then it was over. Back to work. But it wasn’t just about work any more, it was about working to a level that could win more Oscars.” It was a subtle but persistent kind of pressure, almost embarrassing to admit to out loud, Daley says, “that sounded so familiar to me”.
He recalls them flirting their way into an absurd conversation about writing a romcom about life in an Olympic village. “Yeah, that was never gonna happen,” Daley says. “But we took each other’s numbers, like a maybe-we’ll-talk-more-in-the-future thing. I woke up next morning to a text from him.” After Daley returned to London, “we spoke every day. FaceTimed. Texted.” Black talked about losing his brother to cancer, “another reason we connected so well. When he came to London for my birthday, it was the first time we’d seen each other since the night we met. Within a week, we’d named Robbie.”
When Daley says this, we’re drinking takeaway coffee, and I come close to spilling mine. Excuse me?
“Yeah. We talked about marriage, having a kid, what his name would be if he was a boy, all in that first week. I remember telling my best friend and she said, ‘Tom. You’ve spent seven days with him. He could be a serial killer.’ But I just knew. We both did. There’s only been two times in my life I’ve been really sure about something. Not, ‘Yeaaah? OK?’ But sure. One was holding my son for the first time and the other was meeting Lance. A feeling of almost having known them for your whole life. A connection that’s innate.”
For a long time it was long distance. “Love makes you do crazy things. We were four weeks together, three weeks apart, four weeks together. An 11-hour flight, an eight-hour time difference, but we made it work.” Black moved to the UK semi-permanently in 2016, and was granted a leave-to-remain visa shortly before the couple’s wedding in 2017. Robbie was born in summer 2018 after being carried by a surrogate mother in California, “one of our dearest friends now. We speak constantly. Surrogates are like superheroes, incredible women.”
Daley is careful when talking about how the couple have influenced each other, perhaps sensitive to the age gap and the assumption that wisdom must travel downhill. (“Lance always says I’ve taught him a lot.”) It seems pretty clear, though, that Daley has become more emboldened, politically, since the start of their relationship. He has been vocal on issues that many Olympic athletes fudge or avoid; two years ago, at the Commonwealth Games, Daley noted that more than half the countries taking part still criminalised homosexuality, and called for change.
Daley admits he has been criticised by some campaigners for continuing to enter competitions in countries where there is state-encouraged homophobia. “I go to Russia to compete quite often. I’ve competed in the Middle East. Lots of people would say, ‘Boycott. Don’t go.’ But, do you know what? I think that going there, in a married relationship, and being able to compete, and climb on to a podium as a gay man – I think that speaks louder than boycotting. I think it shows we’re real. Visible. I think it’s powerful.”
We get to a part of the harbour that has a postcard view of Tower Bridge. It was one of the symbols of the London Games, an event that can be almost painful to remember now, given the division and uncertainty that has taken root in the country since. What looked like the inauguration of new national unity turned out, in hindsight, to be something like a goodbye party. “Yeah,” Daley agrees, “I think London 2012 brought the nation together in a way that we haven’t seen in recent years.”
I’d read somewhere that, after London, he became a collector of objects imprinted with the British flag. You’re a union jack guy, I start to say…
Daley interrupts: “Yeah. Doesn’t quite have the same meaning any more, to be fair.”
Is it different wearing the colours now than then?
“Um. I mean, I will always have a sense of pride representing Team GB. Because I think the values of Team GB – respect, pride, determination, commitment, the big motto is ‘One Team’ – I think there’s something very powerful there.” Brexit has been a wedge, he acknowledges. His experiences and his views might be different from someone else’s, he says, and both are valid. “I think the most powerful thing in the world is to have all of these unique and different perspectives, and come together as one team. And I hope one day I’ll be back as proud of the country as I was in 2012.”
Our walk around the dock takes us away from the river and into the landscaped gardens outside an office block. It’s a place full of giant concrete blocks, some of them the rough dimensions of diving boards. I ask Daley if he could stand on the edge of each and try to recall where his head was before he dived. He climbs up on the blocks. “So this one is Beijing? And this one is London? And this one is Rio?”
He steps to the first edge. “OK, so this is Beijing. I’m about to dive. I don’t know what I’m doing! What the scale is. It’s fun. I’m enjoying the experience.” He moves along to a second block. “This is London. A real pressure cooker. I’m expected to win a medal in front of the home crowd, but I also have the thought in my mind that Rio is going to be my peak.” He moves along again. “So this is the Rio board. I’m here, it’s my year, it’s my competition. These Olympics mean everything… And I don’t know if there’s such a thing as being too focused, but I’m so focused I’m almost distracted, if that makes sense. I’m not a parent yet. I don’t know if I have the perspective to know what actually matters.”
There’s one more block. Can he predict where his head will be come summer? Oh, easy, Daley says. “It’s not that the Olympics means any less to me now. But I’m in a different headspace. I know there’s no better high than having a child. Yes, winning a medal is amazing, but there won’t be a better feeling than coming back from training today and having Robbie to hold.” So he steps to the edge of the concrete. “This is Tokyo. I will stand at the end of the board and be present. I’ll breathe. I’ll see my son and my husband in the audience. And that’ll be enough.”
A security guard jogs across the garden, waving for Daley to climb down from the blocks. It’s not clear whether he’s worried about the welfare of one of the country’s best medal prospects or just the integrity of the garden, but Daley gets down and apologises. The guard explains: “I was worried you were about to dive off. You could get really hurt, you know?” Daley grins, as if to say: once, maybe. But not now.
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