Weepy but brilliant, diver Tom should win gold for his honesty
You can’t help worrying for Tom Daley. Britain’s darling of the olympic high-dive is a bundle of tautly-strung emotions — one former coach described how the young star would flee the pool squealing in despair when an acrobatic plunge went wobbly.
And in Tom Daley: Diving For Gold (ITV) the 22-year-old admitted he lies in bed, visualising disaster at the Games in Rio. ‘The thought of that breaks my heart,’ he said, his voice cracking. This doesn’t sound like good sports psychology. Surely Lewis Hamilton doesn’t brood about blowouts, Andy Murray doesn’t fixate on double faults. So why is Tom fretting about belly-flops?
As this documentary revealed, with footage shot over four years since the London olympics, it’s because he’s like no one else in the history of British sport. He’s melodramatic, flouncy and he adores attention — all qualities that, when channelled into his dives, put him among the world’s best.
He’s always performing. ‘You’re using your TV presenter’s voice,’ sighed his fiancé, Dustin, as Tom skipped around their flat, filming himself on his phone.
Even as a child, he’d turn every tremor into a full-blown West End spectacular. If his parents wouldn’t bow to his demands, he’d threaten to throw himself out of a window.
This was a shrewdly observed show, edited to highlight small moments that, taken together, were both revealing and touching. We saw him shaking as he sent the news, via social media, that he was in a same-sex relationship, and making the same announcement, with studied insouciance, to his 14-year-old brother, Ben.
Ben’s reaction proves the diva streak doesn’t run in the Daley family. ‘I’m gonna get bullied,’ he sighed, like Eeyore shaking his head at Tigger’s antics. ‘Can I go play on the Xbox now?’
It’s all a world away from the machismo we usually associate with sportsmen. Tom endures the same 5am starts, punishing physio and brutal training that made gold medallists of hard men such as Sir Steve Redgrave or Daley Thompson.
The difference is, this young man doesn’t pose as a superhuman. The documentary portrayed his true colours, as giggly and weepy, flamboyant and insecure . . . an emotional maelstrom whirling round an extraordinary talent.
Programmes this honest aren’t usually made until their subject is dead. Releasing it like this, on the eve of Rio, must have taken exceptional courage — one deep breath and a flying leap from a great height. A gold medal performance.
The bravery of former Royal Marine Arthur Williams is also beyond question, but he was scuppered by health-and-safety concerns, in Flying To The Ends Of The Earth (C4).
To be fair, the problem was impressive. Arthur and a group of Russian ex-military tough guys had etched a helipad onto the ice of a frozen lake in deepest Siberia, where they planned to dive for the wreckage of a World War II fighter plane. But the helicopter, bringing most of the film crew, ignored the makeshift markings and instead zoomed in so low Arthur was almost decapitated, before it ploughed into a snowdrift and tore off its tail rotor in a shower of shrapnel.
The pilot was relaxed: he’d done a similar landing the other day and escaped without a scratch, so he refused to accept any blame. The director, hobbling out of the wreckage, was less sanguine: ‘We’re not travelling with these people again!’ he yelled.
unfortunately, the Siberian air charter business is not a crowded market. Either you flew with the Soviet Suicide Squadron, or you didn’t fly at all. Arthur left by car.
He made the best of it, wrapping himself in a bearskin coat and riding a sled to herd horses across the permafrost, where the temperature can drop to minus 70c. In the farmer’s hut where he took shelter, he tucked into horsemeat, carving slices off a frozen block.
Later, he sailed on a river strewn with icebergs. Arthur’s always game, but this wasn’t ‘flying’. They should have called it Crashing At The Ends of The Earth.