Falling head over heels with Grace
The child prodigy is all grown up, but there’s no sign of fatigue as the Scot heads to Brazil still in love with diving. Mark Woods reports
MANY child prodigies flame out and fade to black. For every Jodie Foster, there’s a Macaulay Culkin. Now 20, Grace Reid has been diving for three quarters of her life but as she sets off for Rio to make her Olympic debut, there is no doubt she is in the camp of post-pubescent survivors, all purpose and light with not even a hint of competitive fatigue.
“My Mum said, ‘OK, you can give it a try’. I was so active when I was younger I think she just wanted me to do something with that energy,” says Reid. “She sent me off to diving and I’ve never looked back. There’s no other sport that compares to it. I eventually got rid of all my other sports and just focused everything on it.”
Go back six years and Reid was a cherubic addition to Scotland’s Commonwealth Games team in Delhi, barely aware of the attention she was accumulating as a precocious pup.
“Looking back at it now, I was so young then that I didn’t take in the enormity of what I was doing,” she says. “I was going, ‘This is the Commonwealth Games. This is great’. I was having the time of my life diving.
“But going to Glasgow 2014, I thought, ‘Holy smokes, I did this four years ago’. I did not appreciate I was in the Village with these huge names. This is just mad.”
Educated at a private school in her native Edinburgh, she has a natural self-confidence amplified by travels far and wide. Diving has opened up the world like one giant Inter-Rail pass. But it remains impressive that her affection for the sport has grown, not wavered, despite years of dawn awakenings to train at the city’s Royal Commonwealth Pool and the nights out sacrificed.
Without such application, it would be impossible to succeed. “I’ve never really minded. I’ve just always loved doing it,” she says.
Not just the competitions accompanied by the roar of the crowd, but also the repetitiveness of each manoeuvre in the hope of a cumulative return.
The mechanics are almost invisible, she explains. “We have something like 2.5 seconds from the start to the finish of each dive. It’s over in the blink of an eye. So it’s really difficult to separate each part even if so much can go wrong in that time. That’s why we do a lot of gymnastics in a harness to get used to the movements and seeing the same things so we know where we are rather than guessing.
“It’s really complex. So much goes into it when you break it down: the conditioning to hold in a shape. The weights training so you’re strong enough to get high enough on the board. There are a lot of components which is why it’s so hard.”
Latterly, Reid has made it look simple, compiling a dossier of accomplishments this year that put her selection for Rio beyond reasonable doubt. She became the first Scot to win an individual European medal for 62 years when claiming bronze in London in May, days after basking in a little A-List limelight when pairing up with Tom Daley to take gold in the synchronised 3-metre pairs event.
Theirs was a swift cameo. The discipline is not in the Olympic schedule. It still splashed further kerosene on her fire. “That was an amazing experience – and to do it in front of a home crowd in London at a European championships – was unbelievable. Tom was fantastic to dive with. Being alongside him and competing on that stage was a real experience.”
That was distinctly off-Broadway compared to the bright lights that will illuminate her leap into the unknown when the heats of her competition begin in Rio on 12 August. The roofless pool will challenge Reid to the max, firstly to reach the semi-finals and then to emerge among the last divers standing.
Her brief partnership with Daley – who will seek a second Olympic medal – has ramped up the fervour above and beyond.
“That spurred me to push myself,” she says. “I was thinking, ‘You are one of the best divers in the world – if not the best – so I have to push myself here to show I deserve to be your partner’. That was encouraging for me. I had the strength to show people I deserved that. But now I want more.”