Turmeric and cherry juice fuels Daley’s recovery bid as he takes gold
A BIZARRE diet of turmeric and cherry juice fuelled Tom Daley’s recovery mission as he overcame a hip injury to win diving gold.
The Daley diet is unlikely to catch on but the 23-year-old believes it was the difference between topping the podium and not even being able to line up alongside dive partner Dan Goodfellow in today’s 10metre synchro competition.
Injury had forced him out of tomorrow’s individual event, but the lesser technicalities of the synchro meant he was able to repair in time for this competition.
It secured a fourth career Commonwealth gold for the father-to-be, and arguably his sweetest, “given that two days ago I was not sure if I was going to be able to compete with my hip”.
He gorged on turmeric, fish and cherry juice and had ice packs constantly applied to the damaged joint.
As he put it: “You can’t go up on a 10m platform with a hip that doesn’t really function that well. That’s why this means so much, because I put everything into the synchro competition, to get to the start line.”
There was a certain irony that hopes of the gold were nearly ruined at the death not by Daley but Goodfellow on the pair’s final dive, a front four-and-ahalf somersaults.
It was a dive Daley had struggled with throughout the two weeks he had been in Australia, and he admitted mentally it had gnawed away at him.
But he nailed it when it mattered, while Goodfellow virtually entered the water bent in half. It opened the way for fellow English pair Matthew Dixon and Noah Williams, who trains in the same London pool as Daley, to sneak the title.
In Goodfellow’s mind, “I thought the boys were going to do it”, but their execution and synchronisation marginally eluded them and the gold went to the pre-event favourites.
While it had been a race against time to get fit, Daley was insistent he could not feel the injury during the competition — although he has no intention of performing a U-turn to compete in the individual event, in which he is the reigning champion.
He and Goodfellow were hardly joined at the hip, their dives nowhere near as slick as they might have been. But in the end, the pair did not need to be at their best.
What the future holds depends on Daley to a certain extent. He is set to become a father for the first time this summer with his partner Dustin Lance Black, via a surrogate.
While he is a veteran of the sport, Daley is still only 23 and, parental duties permitting, he plans to dive on.
“I have no idea what it’s going to be like to be a dad,” he said. “Every athlete has said that having a kid will change the way you think about sport. But everyone that has gone away and come back has been even better.
“One of the Malaysian divers is at her sixth Commonwealth Games so she’s the real veteran here. She won two medals here. I don’t think I’ll quite be able to make six.”
On the evidence of the Gold Coast, any more gold depends on how the body holds up.