I wanted to quit, I was so scared. Now look at me!
Teenage diver Spendolini-Sirieix on her bid for gold
ANDREA Spendolini-Sirieix showed this summer she is no ordinary sixth-form student. While her peers were enjoying their school holidays in August, she was winning double gold at the Commonwealth Games and the European Championships.
There was a time this year, however, when the British diving sensation would have happily swapped all her sporting success for the quieter life of her class-mates.
‘I just wanted to be normal,’ she explains. ‘I just wanted to go home and do homework. It got to the point where I really lost my passion for diving and I was ready to throw away 10 years of hard work. I didn’t want to throw myself off the board and into water.’
Spendolini-Sirieix had developed a ‘fear of diving’. She was scared to even stand on a one-metre springboard in January, never mind the 10-metre platform she usually uses.
The teenager describes her struggle as a ‘mental block’ and compares it to the ‘twisties’ American gymnast Simone Biles suffered from at last year’s Tokyo Olympics.
‘You know the beginner divers? I couldn’t even do the dives that they were doing,’ says Spendolini-Sirieix, who started the sport aged eight and turned 18 last month.
‘It was not good. It was very hard to go through it because I didn’t understand why I was having it. I knew I could do the dives physically, it was just the mental barrier stopping me.
‘Mental blocks are things that athletes in acrobatic sports struggle with. Simone Biles has been open about her struggle with the twisties but it’s something we need to talk about more. I was like, “why are all these people able to do these skills and I can’t do the basic ones?”. You feel very alone.
‘I didn’t want to quit because I didn’t like it. I just wanted to quit because I was too scared. I wasn’t able to concentrate at school because I was concentrating on my fear of diving. It was a very difficult time.’
She soon realised, though, that normality was not for her. She admits she would find a life just studying for her A-levels in history, Spanish and English literature ‘really boring’.
‘I understand now that is not what I want to do,’ she says. ‘I like being different. I like being extraordinary and I like doing things normal people don’t do.
‘There is a lot of adrenaline and fun to have in this sport. But I had to learn that on my own — and I had to really push myself to change my mindset towards training.
‘It was just about taking it slowly and starting from scratch. Building up the skills again until you get to that 10m board. Now it’s a place where I feel at home. It’s very calming. Although your heart still beats fast, it’s excitement and nerves. It’s not a fear any more.
‘It took four or five months to quiet the voices in my head. But if you saw my training in January, then you saw me at Birmingham and at Rome, I’m two completely different athletes.’
Only those closest to Spendolini-Sirieix knew what she had come through to top the podium in the summer, success which saw her named this week as the National Lottery’s Athlete of the Year following a public vote.
Her first victory was her most significant, scoring a personal best to secure Commonwealth Games gold in the 10m platform in front of a full house at the Sandwell Aquatics Centre.
She then won the mixed synchro with Noah Williams, before adding silver in the women’s event with Eden Cheng.
Less than a fortnight later, she secured the European individual title, then the women’s synchro with Lois Toulson, as well as a bronze in the team event. Asked