Chair way to heaven
Reid’s dodging flying furniture on her Olympic journey
Grace Reid insists she’ll be ready to resume her Olympic countdown when lockdown ends thanks to tough love and demands for perfection from her taskmaster coach.
The Scots diving star will spend her 24th birthday this week cooped up indoors rather than enjoying a night out on the town.
Instead, the European and Commonwealth champion is reading book after book to pass the time after the coronavirus crisis ripped up her diary.
But becoming a golden girl in 2021 is never far from her mind and it’s a wild dream with decent odds.
Although Grace first won the hearts of the nation at age 14, when she went from the training pool in Edinburgh to the Delhi Commonwealth Games, a move to London three years ago raised the bar.
Being tutored by top coach Jane Figueiredo means she’s constantly kept on her toes.
And Reid revealed she’s even had a chair flung her way when her standards slip.
She said: “Jane is all or nothing.
She gives 100 per cent every day that we come in and she pushes us to our limits.
“And that can be really hard sometimes, especially on days where you don’t feel like it.
“But that’s why she’s so great – she pulls us through those hard sessions.
“She is a tough cookie, she doesn’t take any prisoners, but she definitely knows how to get the very best out of us.
“I think I was practising a new scale of three-metre dives and I’d made a really good technical change on part of the dive which managed to ruin something else.
“So I ended up doing pretty a terrible dive by the end of it. Before I started to come out the water, this chair was thrown at me.
“I had to go down to the bottom of the pool to get it.”
It underlines Figueiredo’s passion for her formula for success that nudged superstar Tom Daley to a second Olympic bronze in Rio in 2016 and another world title.
Reid said: “The ever-growing stable at the London 2012 Aquatics Centre has really given me a springboard towards new heights. We’ve had new additions to our group each year that I’ve been here, which is so great.
“New faces and a new dynamic are always quite exciting.
“I think the relationship Jane and myself have developed over the past couple of years has really helped me find what’s important to me - how to train better, faster and smarter.
“It’s not necessarily just go, go, go all the time – I have to listen to my body and take advice from the medical team.
“We have a really good system in place now and that has taken a couple of years to get to.”
Reid’s career plan was always to eventually return home.
She was all set to resume the studies she had put on hold at Edinburgh University this September once her second – and possibly final – Olympics were done and dusted. Now the Games are on a 12-months’ delay, completing her degree may well need to be parked again.
But she said: “I have every intention of going back. I do miss that stimulation of my brain.
“I think it can get quite intense sometimes if it’s just diving. Now I’m spending more time on that.
“I’m actually taking French lessons again, which is really exciting. I’m terrible but that’s OK.
“Finishing a university degree in one go would be ideal and it would be normal and super easy.
“But with an elite athlete lifestyle, they don’t tend to go hand in hand.”
New dad Daley will still be there to steer her towards the first-class result she wants in summer 2021.
Their mixed synchro partnership scored world silver in Budapest in 2017 but won’t get an outing in Japan because it’s not an Olympic event.
Grace said: “He literally put diving on the map. It was definitely a minority sport before. Now, for many people, as soon as they think of diving they think of Tom Daley – which is just fantastic. He’s such a fantastic athlete – inside and outside the pool.
“He’s amazing. He’s an asset in himself, what you see is what we get.
“In diving synchro with him.
I’ve learned so much – how he approaches competition, training.
“It has been great to compete alongside him.”