We are probably all a bit guilty of a certain level of double standards here so, after a harrowing weekend of sport, let’s dig out one of the better results and pay it its due.
Last month, Tom Daley had a pretty poor time of it. He was criticised publicly by Alexei Evangulov, the Performance Director of British Diving, for concentrating too much of his time on his commercial work and not enough on his training. Then he stuffed up by finishing seventh in the London test event; which, just short of belly-flopping in the Olympics, is about as public a mishap as he could face.
And what did Evangulov do? He turned straight to the media in the London Aquatic Centre and said: I told you so. In fact, he went further, he described Tom Daley as the Anna Kournikova of diving. I should know; I reported it in The Times. It was a good story.
To what extent Evangulov got it right remains unclear. He swears that Daley should be training harder and that the Chinese, who dominate the sport, work three times as hard as he does. That is his opinion.
Daley’s coach, Andy Banks, who I know and respect and only does straight-talking, insists that Daley actually trains every minute that he demands of him and that if he trained harder, then he would be more susceptible to injury. That is the other opinion. Banks also told me after the London event that because Daley had been suffering from a thumb injury, he had simply not been able to train as much as they would have liked. Not because of shooting any adidas or Nestlé commercials, but because his thumb couldn’t take the attritional workload. So Daley could not train with his synchro partner, Pete Waterfield, and actually Waterfield had been injured too.
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For his next competition, Banks said, Daley would have proper preparation time, and so would Waterfield. Let’s see what happens there.
What happened there was last weekend in Dubai, in the first round of diving’s World Series, a four-leg tour of major diving nations. In the synchro competition, Daley and Waterfield finished just short of bronze, but more and better would follow.
In the individual competition, Daley led at the start and then pushed Qiu Bo, the world champion and stand-out world No 1, all the way. Daley finished a very good second. Pretty much every seasoned diving observer will tell you that, unless Bo forgets his swimming trunks at the London Games, second is as good as Daley, or anyone else, could hope to get.
So hoorah for Daley - though you would not know it. You would not find his triumph being celebrated in the same newspapers that gaily reported the Kournikova slurs, The Times included.
That is just the way news and news agenda-setting goes. Coming second in Dubai isn’t such a hot story. Nor is: maybe he isn’t such a media tart after all.
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But after a month of media coverage reporting the view that maybe he has got his priorities wrong, it is surely only right and fair that we now ask it the other way round: maybe he has actually got them right.