“Breathe. Just keep breathing.” It’s the last dive of the Olympic final, and Matty Lee’s mind is racing. He’s thinking: “Oh my god, you could get an Olympic gold medal.” And he’s thinking: “If you mess this up, you might not get anything.” He feels the adrenalin coursing in him, his focus beginning to wander. But he’s also planned for this. He knows what to do.
Lee and Tom Daley are in the gold-medal position, with a minuscule margin of 1.74 points over Cao Yuan and Chen Aisen of China. Daley knows this. Lee does not. During competitions Daley keeps a close eye on the scoreboard, calculates the gaps in his head, knows what is required at all times. Lee, on the other hand, “doesn’t like to mess with that sort of stuff. I can’t handle it”.
To get to the 10-metre platform, you need to climb four flights of steps. When one team dives, everyone moves up a flight. “I remember being at the bottom of the 10m stairs,” Lee says. “And I remembered a situation like this before. It was the World Series in London in 2019, and I was actually beating Tom until the last dive. But I was too busy thinking about the end product – I’m about to get a medal in front of a home crowd – and forgot what I actually had to do. I messed up the dive.”
The dive Lee and Daley have chosen is their hardest of all: a front four-and-a-half somersaults in tuck position. “You start at the back of the board, and you do a little hop and a skip towards the end,” Lee explains. “And it was weird: right before we started, my mind just went blank. Almost like I had no control. It was like a state of flow. Whatever was going to happen, happened.”
For a sport that demands rigorous physical conditioning, relentless training and complete command of the emotions under the highest pressure, one of the most striking things about diving is how little of it is in your control. Your opponents might pull off perfection. Your partner might mess up. And then comes the greatest variable of all: yourself, and what happens in those 32 feet of clear, terrifying air.
Lee is back home in Leeds now, a gold medal in his hand, his life changed forever. Daley, who has remained in Japan for the individual competition and is keen for his partner to get the credit he deserves, has urged him to “soak it all in”. Through the jet lag and euphoria Tokyo already feels like a strange fever dream: a panoply of vivid images that still makes little sense to him. “You just you don’t think it will actually happen,” he says. “And then it did. And it feels like I’m watching someone else.”
A diving partnership, with its intimacy and fetishisation of small details, is a little like a marriage. Daley jokingly refers to Lee as his “work husband”, and since they teamed up in 2018 it has been a marriage of minds as well as bodies. “We just clicked,” Lee says. “There is genuinely not a bad bone in his body. He was my idol when I was a young diver. Now I’m really proud to call him my mate.”
But it was at the pool where their relationship really blossomed. Naturally similar in height and build, over brutal weeks and months they would build and drill a bulletproof routine that would withstand the pressure of an Olympic final. “During the whole competition, me and Tom didn’t say a single word to each other,” Lee admits. “We were that much in the zone. Nothing was fazing us. That’s what all the training is for. By the time we get to competition, all that’s left is the counting. I say: ‘Ready.’ Then Tom says: ‘One, two, three, go.’”
All that remains is you, the deep blue and your demons. And there are always demons in a sport like this, jumping off a concrete platform the height of a four-storey building into an uncertain fate. Lee nods with recognition at the mention of Simone Biles, a champion athlete crushed between the wheels of self-doubt, external pressure and extreme physical danger.
“Like, it’s so scary,” he admits. “I remember a session not long ago in London, before we flew out to Tokyo, where I literally didn’t know if I was going to make the dive. Which is a horrible feeling. I’ve never experienced the pressure that Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka have been through. But it’s very sad to see them getting so much hate and negativity. With a physical injury, no one bats an eyelid. But as soon as you say it’s your head, they don’t believe you.”
Happily, by the time Lee has embarked on his final dive at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre, he is no longer thinking anything at all. “I did my hop and skip off the board, and felt really light,” he remembers. “I jumped into my tuck shape, and when I was spinning I felt comfortable. Then I saw the water and knew I was going to be upright. As soon as I hit the water, I knew I did a good one.” They both had, to the tune of 101.01 points: about as close to perfection as it is reasonable to expect.
But if anybody was capable of producing an even more perfect riposte, it was the brilliant, mysterious Chinese, who hadn’t been seen in competition all year. “Damn it, that was very good,” Lee remembers thinking as they hit the water in perfect unison. “They probably have got us there.” The wait – a minute that felt like hours – was excruciating. Then, finally, the verdict. Cao and Chen: 101.52. Great Britain had won gold by 1.23 points.
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After which, the memories blur a little. There were generous words from the Chinese, raucous congratulations from everyone else, a medal ceremony, doping control, interviews, celebrations, calls from jubilant family members at home. It was nightfall when Lee finally returned to the athletes’ village with his precious cargo. “You have to go through security every time,” he explains. “And when I put the medal in the tray all the Japanese security people went crazy and started clapping. That was a really nice moment.”
Now back at home, Lee is in no rush to map out his future. Paris in 2024 is a long way away, but he insists: “I’m 23 years old, I’ve easily got another Olympics in me.” And as for Daley? “I honestly have no idea. But it would be great to do another Olympics with him. I would love that.”