Grandma Grace eyes victory
The 22-year-old veteran diving for Olympic gold
Diver Grace Reid describes the moment, aged five, that she plunged off the 10-metre board at her local pool in Edinburgh for the first time as “feeling like flying”. In August of 2018, when Reid clinched gold at the European Championships in that very pool on her final three-metre dive, she says the feeling was scarily similar: “Moments like that feel genuinely like you’re soaring and almost out of body.”
Despite the dreamlike quality of her reminiscing, she is still keen to remind me she is no idealist. As she puts it, some days you are soaring, some days you are having furniture hurled at you in the pool.
“You have competitions where everything just falls into place like that ...
“Equally, there was a day the other week where Jane [Figueiredo], my coach, literally threw a chair at me in the water for messing up a dive,” she laughs. “She then proceeded to make me get the chair from the bottom of the pool. But that’s what coaches are for.”
Keeping it real is exactly what the Edinburgh girl is about. Look up her Instagram and you will find videos of her belly-flopping in training alongside picture-perfect moments on the podium – where she was top in 2018 not only at the Europeans but also at the Commonwealths in April. The 22-year-old says posting her diving failures keeps her “feet firmly on the ground” and shows people what being an elite athlete is truly like. “With my Instagram I’m just trying to share an honest picture of what I do,” she says. “OK, I did well at the Europeans, but there are days when I wipe out, make an idiot out of myself, and that’s OK. Don’t get me wrong, everyone likes to put up the best picture of themselves, but a little bit of humour as well isn’t a bad thing.” This approach has helped her to tackle the pressure she puts on herself. A perfectionist in a sport with such marginal gains seems the best fit imaginable but with 30 hours of training a week, and now dedicating herself solely to the sport after taking a leave of absence from her degree at the University of Edinburgh, Reid says getting out of her blinkered focus is the most challenging part. To help, she does daily morning meditation and credits this mental preparation with helping her to cope at the Europeans. “I walked into that with the weight of the world on my shoulders, with everyone saying, ‘Home advantage, training well, you should win,’ whereas before I had always felt like the underdog,” she says. “I did a lot of mental preparation before the Europeans and consequently on my last dive, where it was now or never, I knew exactly what my process was.”
Someone who knows pressure well is her mixed synchronised diving partner, Tom Daley. The man Reid (and many observers) credits with “putting diving on the map” has helped her to find enjoyment in competing since they became silver medallists at the World Championships in 2017: “When we compete I love it – we dance, we sing, we mess around.”
Though the former Olympic champion has been a mentor to Reid, she is no rookie. Despite her age, she is considered a veteran by her Great Britain team-mates, who have nicknamed her “Grandma Grace” on account of going to her first Commonwealth Games in Delhi aged just 14.
Reid trains with Daley (who has returned after missing the majority of the 2018 season on paternity leave) and about 10 other GB divers in Stratford these days.
The Scot says she loves living in London, and going to a Camden coffee house on her “sacred Sundays” off from training with a good book is among her favourite ways to unwind. She mostly reads thrillers but is currently reading Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House. “A different kind of scary,” she laughs.
She is also a big sports fan, especially tennis, and describes meeting Jo-Wilfried Tsonga at the Olympic Games in Rio as her most star-struck moment in sport – even more so than standing next to Usain Bolt in the canteen in Delhi. “I spoke to him in French, said everything completely wrong, went absolutely red in the face and was mortified.”
Looking ahead to the next Games, Reid is positioned for a potentially stronger finish than her eighth in Rio – but before that she has the World Championships in August. In 2017, she came unbearably close to an individual medal in fourth, but she says looking back on it only gives her confidence.
“I have the ability to go and place fourth at my first World Championships, that’s a huge asset. And now I’m starting to push the girls much more frequently, rather than the odd occasion. Hopefully I can go to Korea and really push for a medal.”
A medal would firmly position Reid in the top echelons of the diving world – and potentially create another moment of flight.