In 2008, Tom Daley returned from the Beijing Games empty-handed. But he didn't lose focus, despite bullying at school and the loss of his father. Now he's ready to perform the best dives of his life
Tom Daley has big hands. When he shakes mine, I am surprised by his oversized, chunky grip. "I also have out-of-proportion feet," he says as we chat in a hotel room in his home town of Plymouth. Are those useful attributes for a diver? "Definitely. Big feet help you balance. The bigger surface area you have with your hands, the cleaner you can hit the water. It's important to go in with the least splash possible."
A bigger splash is what you want if you are David Hockney, not if you are Tom Daley. His aim is to be like Kristofferson in the film Fantastic Mr Fox, who dives from a great height into a bucket of water, making only a teeny-weeny splash before the home crowd go wild for the superb athlete's perfect performance.
Zaha Hadid's Aquatic Centre is more than a bucket, but otherwise this is pretty much the scenario Daley hopes for come the Olympics when he plummets from the 10m board, ideally like a knife slicing the water. "It's going to be down to six dives, 1.6 seconds per dive, so it'll be over quicker than Usain Bolt's 100 metres," he says.
Daley has been dreaming of these dives for most of his life. In 2002, after watching the diving at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester on TV, eight-year-old Tom drew a picture. In the middle was a man standing on his hands on a diving board, wearing union flag trunks, his abs defined by pencil squiggles alongside the words: "My Ambition. London 2012." One of the divers whose performances he recorded and microanalysed in 2002 was Pete Waterfield, now 31, who will be his diving partner for the 10m synchronised competition. Daley will also compete solo in the 10m and 3m platform competitions. "It was my dream then, and still is now, to perform the best dives of my life there – to dive out of my socks." He won't actually have to dive out of his socks, having – you'd hope – sensibly removed them earlier.
But there are a few problems in the way of realising this dream. First, Daley is, in theory, too tall at 5ft 8in. "I'm actually one of the tallest divers," he says. "It helps to be smaller so you can spin faster. But I've got enough strength to outdo the fact that I'm taller than most divers." Second, his Chinese rivals, who dominate the sport. "As a Chinese diver you don't go to school. They get taken away from their families and they are completely focused on diving. They have a conveyor belt of divers – if one gets injured, another comes up."
So how do you beat them? "By the second or third round they expect to be 20 points ahead of the field, so if you stay up there with them they get rattled. They try too hard and the pressure gets to them and they mess up." He smiles, then a shadow passes over his face: "The thing with diving is that you don't know – that kind of pressure might be good for them."
But the biggest problem for any competitive diver is that "anything can happen on the day. One thing can go wrong and you go from first to last in one dive." When Daley became world 10m platform champion in 2009, it was because his leading competitors fluffed their final dives. At the 2004 Olympics, the Greek synchro team won gold despite being nowhere in the event's world rankings. That Greek precedent may suggest that home advantage is helpful – or that anyone with plausible abs, well-filled trunks and oversized hands could shatter Daley's dreams.
Daley has two things that may help. First, what sports physiologists call an inner mental compass. Is that surgically implanted or something? "If you're spinning around you have to know which way's up, which way's down, at all times because if you don't you land flat and you hurt yourself," Daley explains. "There are some divers who just jump off and hope for the best and those are the ones who aren't very consistent. I am."
Second, Daley has developed a mental toughness borne of adversity. Aged 11, he had a growth spurt that changed his body's centre of gravity and ruined his diving technique. "It was so scary. I thought this could be my diving done." Imagine: career over before puberty started. What happened? "I had to learn it again. Diving's 80% psychological. It's not a sport like tennis or football where if you hit or kick a ball in a different direction you have to refocus your movements. You can only focus on yourself. I go into my own little bubble and then the results look after themselves."
This makes diving sound like the loneliest activity. "It is and it isn't. Diving's a really friendly sport where you want everyone to do well." Imagine Wayne Rooney or Dereck Chisora saying that.
But in the three hours Daley spends poolside during a competition, has nobody ever given him the evils, whispered "Your reverse pike sucks, you big-handed loser!" or deleted his iPod's inspirational playlist? "No. I'm as nice to everyone as I can be and everyone's nice to me."
We're meeting because Daley has published his autobiography, aged 18. If you have any issues with people publishing their life stories before they have actually reached adulthood, direct them to the Penguin Group UK, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL. "We were originally thinking of a picture book with minimal words. Then I realised how much I wanted to say."
There remain lots of pictures in the published version, mostly of Daley in his trunks, sometimes in the chilly waters off Plymouth Hoe, and always enviably buff. He has the ripening torso that recalls Daniel Radcliffe when, aged 17, he took a break from being Harry Potter and posed topless to promote his stage performance in Equus. Daley shows me the proposed cover image on his phone. If he is the hottie male answer to Team GB poster girl Jessica Ennis, then this image of him half naked with a flag over his shoulders clinches the point. ("When we saw that in the office," says the PR woman from Penguin, "we were like, 'Oh my God.'" How Penguin has changed: there probably wasn't an "Oh my God" moment when it decided the cover image for Goethe's Maxims and Reflections or Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils.)
The life-defining epiphany in Daley's life came aged seven while swimming at Central Park pool, 10 minutes from the family home in Plymouth. "I looked up at the 10m platform and every time someone walked to the edge and jumped, my eyes were popping out of my head. I thought that was pretty cool. I loved the thought of being able to do somersaults into the water."
His dad Rob signed him up for diving lessons the following weekend, saying later it was the best £25 he ever spent. He then became his son's almost constant companion, driving him to competitions, videoing his dives and laminating his certificates and cuttings.
Doesn't Daley find it boring chucking himself off boards into water umpteen times a day during what could have been the best years of his life? "No. It's different every day. Each dive is different. I love the feeling of weightlessness, the freedom."
Reading the book, I was amazed by how young Daley was when competitive diving took him away from his family. Aged nine, he stayed overnight for a competition in Southampton. The book teems with tearful phone calls home to his mum, Debbie. "My mum didn't like it when I rang upset. She wanted to come over and get me." Aged 11, he competed in the 2007 Australian Youth Olympic Festival, after its minimum age requirement of 15 was relaxed for him. He won the silver medal in the 10m synchronised diving with partner Callum Johnstone, beating competitors more than double his age. By 13, he was a sporting prodigy. In January 2008, he became the youngest winner of the senior British 10m title. He also won the 10m platform synchro title with new partner Blake Aldridge. That summer, he flew to Beijing for the first of what he hopes will be four Olympic competitions in his career.
At Beijing, Daley snuck into the American camp to hang out with diver Mary Beth Dunnichay, whom he fancied. He even feigned an American accent so as not to arouse suspicion. "I don't think it worked," he writes. It's a rare passage in the book: otherwise Daley is unremittingly focused on diving. Doesn't he feel he is missing out? "It's my dream to go to the Olympic Games and win a medal and I know I'm not going to be able to do that if I'm constantly going to a girlfriend's house and her ringing up every 10 seconds saying: 'Why haven't you called me today?' I'm not up for a relationship."
His first Olympics were overshadowed by a mid-competition row with synchro partner Blake Aldridge, which Daley describes in the book. After their fifth dive, Aldridge rang his mum from poolside. "'I'm sorry, Mum. I don't know what's happening, it's not going very well,' he was saying. 'Tom's being all moody.' I called over to him. 'Blake, shouldn't you be off your phone now? Don't apologise to your mum. We need to go out there and show everyone what we can do.' 'Don't tell me what to do. I can do what I want.'" The pair came a disappointing eighth. At the press conference, 26-year-old Aldridge blamed 14-year-old Daley for their poor performance, saying: "He had a pop at me before the last dive."
When I ask Daley about this incident, he says: "I don't know why it happened. All I could do is focus on my own performance. It was only when I got home I realised the amount of coverage we had got and I thought, 'Wow, I didn't realise we'd fallen out so terribly." Are they still in touch? "I keep in touch with him on Facebook and when I see him at nationals say hello. It's not awkward. It's one of those things you have to get over."
After Beijing, Daley returned home and was bullied at Eggbuckland Community College. It started with him being called "Diver boy" and escalated to him being physically assaulted, mostly by older boys. In one incident, a boy said to Daley, "How much are your legs worth? I'll break them for you" before rugby tackling him. "Looking back," writes Daley, "I can see that they were probably jealous but it didn't feel like it then. It was hell." Matters came to a head when he was tackled by a "fairly big guy" and fell awkwardly on his wrist. "It swelled up. I wasn't allowed to land hands-first during my diving for five days." His mother and father decided to pull him out of school and transfer him to Plymouth College. Before the bullying, Daley was already a supporter of ChildLine. He says his experiences reinforced his commitment to the counselling service. "At the time you think it's OK, it'll go away, and then it keeps going on. So it's good to unload the burden on to someone else. Tell parents or a teacher – just say something. You don't want it inside you. You've got to let it out, and then hopefully things get better."
Why was it easier at Plymouth College? "It was a school where they have lots of sports people. So they understood the sacrifices you needed to do in terms of hours at school for training. They were just so supportive." It's there that he has started A-levels in photography, maths and Spanish. "It only takes an injury and it's over, so I have to have something to take me off into a career."
He hopes to become a TV presenter, but he is also developing some talent as a photographer – the book includes some of his pictures, including elegant underwater shots of diving and arty shots of fellow diver Tonia Couch. If the diving fails, he has given himself a springboard (so very sorry) into professional photography. "I'm very proud of my photographic work. Everything I do I put in 100% effort because I feel I've failed if I get a B. In my A-levels, I'm on for three As."
He has the jump on fellow photography students in one respect: unlike them, he gets to photograph Kate Moss. During a recent Bruce Weber photo shoot for Italian Vogue, he hung out with Moss at a pool in London's Victoria and asked the supermodel if he could take some pictures of her for his coursework. She agreed. "I felt really bad telling her what to do. In the end I said: 'To be honest, I'm not going to tell you what to do because you know far more than I do.'" The book includes two of his photos of Moss – one in which she's pouting in her swimsuit outside the female changing room; the other leaning against a wall looking like trouble (but in a good way).
While Daley struggled at school, his dad had developed brain cancer. Tom flew back from a competition in Mexico to find him dying at home. In the book, he describes his feelings shortly after his father's death in May last year. "I thought about everything I had done, every podium I had stood on with Dad looking on crying, every training session I had been to and Dad was in the balcony, talking to the other parents, clapping each dive I made."
He describes his father as his best friend, and Rob certainly was his closest companion. "Definitely. As long as I tried my best and worked hard, he was happy. It's been difficult, but my dad would have wanted me to carry on going strong. He's still giving me that extra drive."
Earlier this year, Alex Evangulov, performance director of British Diving, warned that Daley's medal chances were being jeopardised by all the media and sponsorship work he had been doing in the runup to the Games. He has 225,000 Twitter followers, has already endorsed several sporting products and is tipped to have more after the Olympics.
Last week Daley launched an iPhone app aimed at improving awareness of the sport. The Tom Daley Dive scores gamers according to their ability to copy 79 of his dives. A sceptic might suggest that instead of signing off on every aspect of the app, he might have concentrated more on real diving. That same sceptic might eat their words, though, after Daley won 10m gold last weekend in the European championships at Eindhoven, scoring two perfect 10s from the judges.
"The thing is I owe my dad everything and all I can do to show him that is to keep training hard, working as hard as I possibly can," he says. "I'm going to have to go into my own little bubble and give it my best shot."
