Aptly for a diver, Tom Daley’s life has been a series of ups and downs, and now he’s sharing the lessons he’s learned in a new book. He talks to Emma Higginbotham.
The perfect dive, says Tom Daley – four-time Olympian, surprise knitting guru and perhaps our youngest national treasure – is a blend of grace, power and precision. There’s no time to blink or breathe as you plummet to the pool at 35mph, and less than two seconds to show what you’ve spent endless hours refining.
So when he stepped to the edge of the 10m platform in Tokyo this summer, ready to perform six synchronised dives alongside Matty Lee, the pressure was palpable. “It’s like a penalty shoot-out,” he says. “You have one chance, and if you miss any of the penalties, you’re out.”
Nobody watching as dive after dive hit the target could blink or breathe either, but the gold was theirs, and Tom is still incredulous. “It’s so crazy to think that it’s actually happened, and to do it with Matty, one of my best mates, was just amazing. You have such a high expectation of what you want to achieve, and it’s only really since winning the gold medal that all of that just slipped away. Finally I feel like I’m whole.”
For Tom, it’s been 20 years coming. Born in May 1994, the eldest of three boys, he was seven when he started taking diving lessons at his local pool in Plymouth. “I loved being in water and going to water parks, but I was never that bothered about swimming. Diving was a combination of the excitement of a water park and a sport. I just found it fun.”
He was talented, too. Children don’t usually dive from the 10m platform until they’re 12 – Tom was eight. Winning competitions, he says, became like a drug. At 13 he was the youngest person ever to claim gold at the European Championships, and at 14 he took part in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, placing 8th in the synchro and 7th in the individual events.
“It was so surreal,” he recalls. “I had no idea what I was getting into. I was just excited about getting a bit of extra time off school.” Back home, however, the bullies were out in force, calling him ‘Speedo boy’ and pushing him around. It became so bad that he had to move schools.
The trophies continued to pile up. Tom was regularly in the news with his ever-smiling dad, Rob, waving his Union Jack flag (actually an oversized beach towel) at every event. But brain cancer was slowly consuming the 40-year-old. In spring 2011, Tom, then 17, was called home from a training camp in Mexico. With his mum and brothers, he held his dad’s hands as he died.
Tom dived through his grief, not missing a single session. “I just had my blinkers on and didn’t really deal with it,” he says. “It was like ‘pretend it hasn’t happened, keep going, keep going’. It was only after 2012 that I really sat down with my grief and let it hit me.”
Just months after his father’s death, a coach told Tom he needed to lose weight. He was perplexed. “I’d never thought about my body in that way before, I just ate what I wanted,” he says. “Then all of a sudden I started to examine everything I ate.” It triggered a spiral of disordered eating. He’d cut out carbs, go without food for a whole day, eat then make himself sick. He lost 9 kilos and, utterly exhausted, resolved to eat for energy for the 2012 Olympics. But that nagging feeling didn’t go away.
“Still now I have a weird relationship with food and weighing myself,” he admits. “Men suffer with body image issues more than people think, and lots of people go through it in silence. There is so much pressure, especially within sport, and as a diver there isn’t anywhere to hide! It’s all there for everyone to judge. We all have to be a lot more considerate about making flippant comments about people’s bodies.”
That struggle with food is just one of the issues Tom tackles in his candid new autobiography, Coming Up for Air, which he’s “excited and nervous” about releasing. “Looking back at the person I was at the beginning of my diving career to now, and how it’s all changed, it’s been an experience,” he says. “But I want to share the lessons that I’ve learned.”
The book begins with Tom winning bronze at the London Olympics. Although gutted that his dad wasn’t there, he reveals that his ashes are actually buried by the diving boards at the London Aquatics Centre. “It’s such a fitting place for him to be. His dream was to see me win a medal at the Olympic Games in London 2012, and he had the best seat in the house.”
The months following the Olympics were tough. Tom developed a fear of his showpiece twisting dive, which led to obsessive thoughts and insomnia. With nothing to focus on, he had a “midlife crisis aged 18”, and even considered quitting. Then, at a dinner in LA in 2013, he became transfixed by the man sitting opposite. Surreptitiously googling him under the table, he discovered it was Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of the 2008 movie Milk. It was love at first sight.
“I know it sounds really clichéd, but it honestly was. We’d been through similar life experiences, but in different fields – the highs of success and the lows that come after it – and we’d both been through loss. We connected on such a deep level, and it just seemed right.” Six weeks later Lance flew to the UK for Tom’s 19th birthday, “and in that first week we said we loved each other, we were boyfriends, we named our children.”
Tom came out to his mum, Debra, assuming she already knew: “I used to wear tea towels around my waist like skirts when I was younger, and they had to be perfect,” he laughs. “But she said ‘Tom, I had no idea. You’ve had all these girlfriends!’” After telling other friends and family, he then came out publicly in a YouTube video, at a time when it was incredibly unusual for a sportsman.
“I think it’s the fear of losing sponsorship, losing fans, losing out on being picked for teams,” he muses. “I’m lucky; a sport like mine is quite accepting, whereas in football and rugby it’s more difficult because of the abuse they get. But if more people come out and share their personal story, it’s going to be very powerful for young people.” The video has had more than 13 million views.
Tom’s thoughts then turned to the 2016 Rio Olympics. Aged 22 and in his prime, he hoped he’d get gold, then retire. But after winning bronze in the synchro, he astonished everybody – most of all himself – by diving so badly that he didn’t qualify for the final of the individual event. “I’d been building up to that moment all my life,” he says, “and I’d blown it.” Distraught, he took two months off and came back gradually: as proof of his grit, at the World Championships the following year, Tom beat Olympic champion Chen Aisen to the gold.
He married Lance the same year, and they started planning their family. Tom admits he’d been buying baby outfits since the age of 17, and had filled a whole drawer by the time he met Lance. They found a surrogate in the States, and both donated sperm so they wouldn’t know who the father was: “It didn’t matter,” he says. “The child would be ours.”
Robbie Ray Black-Daley was born in June 2018, and being ‘Papa’ (Lance is ‘Daddy’) to “the sweetest, kindest cuddle-monster” is, says Tom, the best thing in the world. Yet being gay dads attracts both scorn and scrutiny. “Because we’re not seen as the normal family, you do feel like you almost have to over-achieve. Some people are very much of the opinion that only men and women together as a couple can be parents,” he says. “But what a family looks like now is so different. Single mums, single dads, two mums, two dads, being raised by grandparents... I know that we’re doing the best we can for Robbie, and that’s the most important thing.”
Fatherhood, he adds, has completely changed his perspective. He no longer obsesses about diving, and credits his Tokyo success – both his synchro gold and individual bronze – to his new family. “I put it completely down to them. I went into that competition knowing that my husband and my son were going to love me regardless, and it just takes so much pressure off of me.”
It wasn’t just his diving that won Tom attention this summer: someone photographed him clacking his knitting needles poolside and, even though he’s been knitting for 18 months, “all of a sudden it went bonkers.” He’d taught himself to knit from a YouTube video to force himself to relax, and hasn’t looked back. “I love the mindfulness of it, the creativity of it, the satisfaction of being able to make something to give to someone else,” he says. “It’s great for someone like me, that’s always fidgety and can be quite anxious. I’d love to become a knitwear designer and make my own range. That’s a dream of mine, so fingers crossed.”
At the grand old age of 27 and with four Olympic medals under his belt, Tom sees himself as the dad of the diving team, and is considering a future in TV presenting. What would his father make of it all? “I hope he would be extremely proud of everything I’ve achieved,” he says, “and who I am as a person.” Is he proud of himself? He pauses. “I do look back with a sense of pride, but I feel like I’ve got a whole life ahead of me as a non-athlete as well. It feels like it’s just the beginning.”
So he’s not aiming for the 2024 Paris Olympics? “I’m definitely taking a long break, but I haven’t made any final decisions,” he grins. “Who knows? I might still have a little bit more fight left in me yet.”
::Coming Up for Air: what I learned about sport, fame and fatherhood by Tom Daley (Harper Collins) is out now
Much admired for his boyish good looks, Tom has been photographed with Kate Moss for Italian Vogue and posed nude for David Hockney. When Stella McCartney designed the Team GB kit, she said his trunks were the smallest amount of material she’s ever worked with.
He has a whopping 3.5 million Instagram followers (@tomdaley), and his knitting account (@madewithlovebytomdaley) has 1.4 million fans. Popular photos include Tom and Robbie in matching cardigans, his Union Jack medal pouch and various small dogs in woollen jumpers.
He’s adamant that countries where homosexuality is illegal shouldn’t be allowed to host large sporting events, yet refuses to boycott diving competitions in those countries, saying: “Going and being visible is very, very powerful.”
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in October 2021 (c) Waitrose