Why I plunged into the deaths of despair

After the high of winning bronze at London 2012, diver Tom Daley was crippled with anxiety and ended up in therapy. But now he’s going for gold again, and here he tells Kathryn Knight what saved him

The first thing I notice about Tom Daley when we meet is that he has a swathe of clingfilm wrapped around both upper biceps. At first I think he’s suffered some kind of peculiar accident, until I see the ice pack underneath. Fresh from training in London’s Olympic swimming pool, it apparently helps with blood flow to the muscles, as Tom helpfully explains. ‘Like you freeze your chicken breasts to make them last longer. It’s kind of the same thing,’ he smiles.

Safe to say that with just a week to go until the start of the Rio Olympics, nothing is being left to chance to get Tom the gold medal he so desperately covets. ‘It’s the thing that drives me every day, and has done for my whole life,’ he admits. ‘It’s the one title I haven’t won yet.’ That ‘whole life’, of course, is a relatively short one thus far. Still only 22, Tom was just 14 when he first competed for the UK at the Beijing Olympics where he failed to win a medal. At 18 he became pretty much the poster boy for the London Games, where he went on to win a bronze medal in the 10m Men’s Platform dive under gargantuan pressure from the home crowd and while still in mourning for the loss of his beloved father Rob from a brain tumour the year before.

The last four years, though, have proved to be even more momentous. There’s been a move from his native Plymouth to the bright lights of London, and a change of diving coach. He also dipped his toe into different waters as the expert mentor on ITV’s celebrity diving challenge show Splash!, but although the first series pulled in over 5 million viewers it was cancelled in 2014 after two series. And that’s just for starters: three years ago Tom revealed he was in a gay relationship and last October announced his engagement to his partner, the American screenwriter and director Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for writing the Sean Penn film Milk in 2009. These being the good bits, because it turns out there has been some pretty grim stuff too, not least a post- Olympic slump that left Tom suffering from crippling anxiety that almost ended his career and which he has only now spoken about publicly.

If it were not for Lance, he says, he would probably not be preparing for Rio. ‘I have Lance to thank for so many things, and in a way I don’t think I’d be diving if I hadn’t met him,’ he says. ‘I’m the happiest that I’ve been and I think that transfers into my diving.’ Little wonder that the phrase that springs to mind when asked to summarise what has happened since London 2012 is ‘a bit of a rollercoaster’ – one traced in a compelling new documentary for which cameras followed Tom’s highs and lows of the last four years.

It shows a determined but thoughtful man – or to use Lance’s words, someone far more complicated and emotional than his winning on-camera persona might suggest. Is that a fair description? ‘Yes definitely,’ Tom says. ‘I guess people see you on the end of the diving board in these awesome places, winning medals and all the success stories. What they don’t see is how hard it is to train six hours a day six days a week and the things you have to sacrifice. Sport isn’t a 9 to 5 job, it’s a lifestyle. And like everybody else I struggle sometimes.’

And never more than in the wake of the London Games. While Tom describes stepping onto the podium to receive his bronze medal as ‘the biggest high of his life’, it was also followed by a crashing fall. Afterwards, Tom had just ten days off before returning to his gruel l ing t raining regime and its attendant lifestyle restrictions. ‘ Ten days off really wasn’t enough,’ he says now. ‘After all those years of dedication I got a taste of what it was like to be 18 – I was going out with my friends and having an amazing time. On the tenth day I thought, “Oh, I’m finally relaxed”, and then I had to go back to training the next day.’

The trouble was, his mindset had changed. ‘You’ve gone off this massive high that you’ve been working for then you kind of feel like you’ve gone down a trapdoor and you’re in the dark. I had the thought of, “I never want to do this again, I never want to go in a pool again. I don’t like this sport. I hate it.”’ Worse, he was haunted by a dramatic Olympian moment: Tom famously protested to the referee in the final round when he was put off during a crucial dive – a twisting dive that had long been his weakest point – because of cameras flashing in the crowd. He was allowed to retake the dive, which he executed well, briefly pushing him into the gold medal position before he slipped back to third. Once the Games were over, the thought of repeating that dive liter-

‘Every time I got on the board I was terrified’

ally terrified him. ‘It really did rule my life, it was the most terrifying thing every time I went into training, when I stood on that board I was thinking about it,’ he says now. It manifested itself in obsessive-compulsive thoughts (‘If I stepped on three drains in the pavement I thought the world was going to end, if I didn’t sleep well, if I didn’t eat the right things, it would all go wrong’) for which a desperate Tom underwent some pretty hardcore treatment, from post-traumatic stress therapy to hypnotherapy in a bid to tackle the problem. None of it seemed to help much, and the cumulative stress meant that by March 2013, not even a year after the London Olympics, Tom was seriously considering quitting the sport. ‘The struggle every single day to get up, get motivated and then be terrified of diving for six hours a day...’ he tails off. Still overshadowing it all, too, was his father’s death in 2011. Rob Daley was his son’s biggest cheerleader. He’d given up his job as an electrician to accompany Tom to all his tournaments and was best able to interpret and manage his moods. ‘He always knew what to say to make me feel better. If I was doing well or not doing well he was just there to be supportive,’ he reflects. ‘Sometimes after training sessions he would just drive and we would get ice cream. Without even speaking he would know what was up and he would just make it all better, he just knew how to make me happy.’ As he wrestled with what to do next, Tom decided to take an unscheduled break from training to fly to Los Angeles and attend an awards ceremony. While there, friends introduced him to Lance, a gay rights champion who at 42 is 20 years older than Tom. It was an instant attraction – so much so that Tom made the first move, slipping Lance his number on a piece of paper at the end of the evening. A bold move, and all the bolder given that Tom had, by his own admission, not then fully processed his own feelings about his sexuality. He had never ‘really analysed it’ he says – or as he puts it in the documentary: ‘I’d always thought that, you know, a guy is attractive but I never ever thought that I could be in love or be in a relationship, but then once I met Lance it was like, “Wow, this is the first time I’ve ever had feelings for a guy.”’

On paper at least, it initially seemed an unlikely match: the urbane, fortysomething activist and the homeloving south-westerner then not yet out of his teens. Yet they have more in common than initially seems apparent: both are utterly driven in their respective fields, both had lost close loved ones not long before they met – in Lance’s case his brother to cancer and his mother to polio. ‘I’ll never be able to fill his father’s shoes and he will never be able to fill my brother’s shoes or my mother’s shoes, but we can be there for each other,’ Lance tells the documentary at one point. Tom puts it more simply. ‘You can’t help who you fall in love with – and it was him.’

As for Tom’s mother Debbie, she was ‘very accepting’ of the relationship when he revealed it to her at a family barbecue to which Lance was invited. ‘I thought it was going to be this massive hour-long ordeal to have to say it but she was completely fine with it.’

Nine months after they got together, Tom decided it was time to tell the world, releasing a YouTube video in which he announced he’d been in a relationship with Lance since earlier that year. The moment he put it online is recorded by the documentary cameras, who capture his hands shaking as he uploads it. ‘I didn’t quite know what was going to happen. I thought the world was going to end and the walls would start crumbling down but it was fine,’ he says now. ‘Everyone was so supportive.’ His first congratulatory tweet, indeed, was from none other than Kylie Minogue.

There was one small cloud hanging over proceedings: prior to his big announcement Tom also came out to his younger brothers William, then 16, and Ben, then 14. In a poignant moment also captured on camera, Ben confides he’s worried that he is going to get bullied at school. As someone who was himself bullied – Tom moved school prior to his GCSES after being the victim of playground taunts in the wake of his appearance at the Beijing Games – that must have been difficult to hear? ‘Of course, initially I thought, “Oh my God, am I going to be ruining his school life?” But in fact it turned out to be completely different to what he imagined,’ he says.

‘Maybe 15 years ago it might have been a different story, but I had so

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Tom with his bronze medal at the London Olympics