Tom Daley won the fourth Olympic medal of his career yesterday — a bronze medal in the 10m platform event — in one of the highest-scoring finals in Olympic diving history.
The 27-year-old, who won his first gold in the 10m synchro platform alongside Matty Lee, slipped from a super-fine lead at the halfway point to third position with one dive to go.
Daley had already had his fairytale ending in Tokyo. He could have walked away and basked in the achievement he had chased for more than a decade. Instead, he strapped his triceps with ice packs, taped up his wrists, and pushed on.
Competing at his fourth Olympic Games, he has joked that he is the “grandad” of the sport, but the pain can be no laughing matter.
Perhaps the defining feature of these Games, for Daley, has been how much he has enjoyed them. After finishing the preliminary dives on Friday, where he placed fourth, he said he was feeling “really good”, moving “really well”, even making everything “really easily”. “I’ve been having a lot of fun,” he said.
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His team-mate, Lois Toulson, joked that Daley had been trying to recruit Team GB staff to support him at the pool and there was certainly a healthy contingent of Union Jack flags, despite the fact that most of his team-mates had already flown home. As the clock counted down before the competition, lights flashed across the walls. Music blared. One track had the melody of a circus tune. But this was a world away from the circus Daley is used to. He has been photographed, interviewed, scrutinised, admired and criticised since he was 14. His long-time coach, Jane Figueiredo, said before Tokyo that one bonus of lockdown had been to give Daley more rest. “His red carpet [appearances], interviews, the commitment with sponsors, has been greatly reduced,” she said. “I always used to battle with him about resting.”
Even the lack of crowds was a potential bonus. “It’s a lot of pressure when you have the media, fans, the hype,” she said earlier in the year.
Figueiredo only needed him to do what he did in practice all the time. “I’m always telling him: I just want you to be like you are every day. I don’t need anything special. I need what you do every day, because every day you’re pretty special.”
Yesterday he produced more than one extra-special dive, but was outclassed by two Chinese athletes, Cao Yuan and Yang Jian, leaving a 32-point gap to bronze.
He scored 98.60 points on his first dive, with 9.5 and 10 scores across the board. The only diver to score more in the first round was Yuan, with 102 points. At the halfway point, after round three, Daley was in the lead by a nail-biting 0.8 points, but after round four, that gap had reversed and widened to 15.9 points, as Yuan took the lead, Jian second place, and Daley slipped to third.
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In hindsight, his fourth dive, with a score of 80.50, cost him the gold. For his fifth, a forward 4½ somersaults with tuck, he scored 94.35, eliciting a couple of “whoas” and clapping from four fellow divers. Yuan, executing the same dive, scored 101.75. At the side of the pool, wrapped in a towel, Daley lent back against the wall.
His final dive, a back 3½ somersaults in pike, scored him 8.5s and 9s, totalling 91.80. Gold was gone, but he looked far from disappointed.
“I’ve been through lots of different Olympics and lots of different mindsets and perspectives going through my whole Olympic career,” Daley said before flying out.
“I no longer define myself by my performance. Whether it’s good or bad, I know I can go home to my family. That’s something that’s really comforting and which has allowed me to take the pressure off myself to go out there and actually enjoy it.”
