From being objectified at 14 to coming out five years later, the diver has lived his life in public. Still only 24, he talks about his marriage to Lance Black, fatherhood – and why he’s speaking out about gay rights around he world
You could say this about any famous athlete, but Tom Daley more than most: you’re so used to seeing him in some outlandish endeavour – superhuman, ethereal, from such a young age, on such a vast stage, a Peter Pan without the wires – that it is incredibly confusing to see him sitting, like a regular person, in a regular London office (his publisher’s), in regular clothes, talking about mindfulness. He is about to publish Tom’s Daily Goals, subtitled “Never feel hungry or tired again”, which is a bit rum from this beacon of good living, yet of course, hard physical graft for many hours of most days means that he probably knows better than most what hunger and tiredness mean.
“I’ve toned this book towards imagining what my mum would be able to do, and what people would have time to do,” he says. Besides, he says, it’s not like the old days, when he could eat anything and do anything: most mornings, he wakes up and something hurts. He is still recovering from a shin injury, which itself is related to a hip problem, which itself is about a “lack of thoracic mobility. As I’ve gotten older as a diver, I have to really focus on doing everything I can to make my body younger.” He turned 24 in May, but, of course, elite athletes live time differently, do as much to themselves in a year as everyone else does in a decade; yet even leaving aside the brute physical endeavour, he has lived a lot of life; at 14, he was the youngest British competitor in the 2008 Olympics, dragging his sport with him on to the front pages. He still wears a ring of the Olympic rings that his parents got him, in lieu of what he really wanted. “They were, like: ‘We know you’re going to get a tattoo, but you know, we can’t let our 14-year-old get a tattoo. Imagine what your brothers would ask for.’” (He now has them tattooed on the inside of his upper right arm.)
Written by Zoe Williams
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/jul/30/tom-daley-if-i-hadnt-met-lance-i-dont-know-if-id-be-diving-now under the title “Tom Daley: ‘If I hadn’t met Lance, I don’t know if I’d be diving now’”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
