Tom Daley found coming out traumatic

Dennis TNovember 3, 2021

12 2 minutes read

It was one of the defining images of the deeply surreal Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games: Britain’s perennial wunderkind Tom Daley, now 27, had just had his first-ever gold medal draped around his neck by his synchronised diving partner (and close friend), Matty Lee. A canny photographer zoomed in on his face just as two perfect tears had begun their descent from his eyes toward the Team GB mask obscuring the rest of his face – a stark reminder of the near-untenable conditions under which it had been won.

You know when you see in movies where everything flashes back before your eyes? It really kind of does,” Daley told GQ. It all came back to the athlete there and then: crushing failure at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 at just 14 years old; his first bronze medal in front of a rapturous home crowd in 2012; another at Rio 2016, followed by injury woes that threatened to end his career; and now, in a near-empty stadium in Tokyo during a pandemic, his life-long dream fully realised. “[I thought of] all of the people who have helped me and supported me behind that medal – it’s huge.

Daley didn’t get here by accident. A very 21st-century multi-hyphenate (a dad, a vlogger and, improbably, a brilliant crocheter and knitwear designer), he is also one of those deeply focused athletes who has poured absolutely everything he has into his sport for the best part of 20 years. In conversation with GQ over Zoom from Canada, where he’s taking an extended break, he spoke in great detail, almost longingly, about diving. He rattled off exactly how long he spends in the air during his ten-metre dives (1.6 seconds), the speed at which he’s going to hit the water (35 mph) and explained the potential fallout of a split-second error (“You can split your skin, cough up blood, you can hit your head on the board…”). Yet, still, after all these years, he can’t get enough.

Now, with Olympic gold to his name and a new memoir (aptly titled Coming Up For Air, out now) which details his rise to the top, Daley spoke to GQ about the Olympics, becoming Instagram’s crochet king, Paris 2024 and his hopes for a surprising career shift after retirement.

Do you remember what it was like to dive off the ten-metre board for the first time?

Yeah. I was seven, just about to turn eight, and I remember walking up to the end of the diving board and I was like, “There’s no way!” It felt so high and it felt so narrow that I ended up crawling to the end of the board because I thought I was going to fall off. I had this mindset of, like, if I force myself to jump off, once I’m in the air I can’t go back. So I just had to, like, force my body to jump off. And then I remember falling through the air and hitting the water and then kind of [coming] back up and being like, “That was fun. I wanna do that again!

Source: GQ-magazine

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