You could say this about any famous athlete, but Tom Daley more than most: you’re so used to seeing him in some outlandish endeavour – superhuman, ethereal, from such a young age, on such a vast stage, a Peter Pan without the wires – that it is incredibly confusing to see him sitting, like a regular person, in a regular London office (his publisher’s), in regular clothes, talking about mindfulness. He is about to publish Tom’s Daily Goals, subtitled “Never feel hungry or tired again”, which is a bit rum from this beacon of good living, yet of course, hard physical graft for many hours of most days means that he probably knows better than most what hunger and tiredness mean.
“I’ve toned this book towards imagining what my mum would be able to do, and what people would have time to do,” he says. Besides, he says, it’s not like the old days, when he could eat anything and do anything: most mornings, he wakes up and something hurts. He is still recovering from a shin injury, which itself is related to a hip problem, which itself is about a “lack of thoracic mobility. As I’ve gotten older as a diver, I have to really focus on doing everything I can to make my body younger.” He turned 24 in May, but, of course, elite athletes live time differently, do as much to themselves in a year as everyone else does in a decade; yet even leaving aside the brute physical endeavour, he has lived a lot of life; at 14, he was the youngest British competitor in the 2008 Olympics, dragging his sport with him on to the front pages. He still wears a ring of the Olympic rings that his parents got him, in lieu of what he really wanted. “They were, like: ‘We know you’re going to get a tattoo, but you know, we can’t let our 14-year-old get a tattoo. Imagine what your brothers would ask for.’” (He now has them tattooed on the inside of his upper right arm.)
Three years later, his father died of a brain tumour. A year after that, he became the mascot of all the exuberance and optimism that unexpectedly exploded with the London Olympics. “By 2013, I was thinking: ‘What am I doing? What now?’ All I’d focused on was London 2012, all I’d been thinking was: ‘I’ve got to try and medal.’ But then what? I was just down in the dumps. I went through a phase of just enjoying myself, eating what I wanted, going out with my friends, being an 18-year-old. I didn’t even know if I wanted to dive any more. If I hadn’t met Lance, I don’t know if I’d be diving now.”
It is both bizarre and yet completely predictable that, with his very early fame came remorseless objectification (“It was really weird, I was still at school. I was, like: ‘What the hell is going on?’”) and pretty relentless interrogation about his sexuality. By 2013, “lots of my friends knew that I wasn’t necessarily fussy in that sense. Boys, girls, whatever. Journalists always asked: ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ And I always said: ‘No, diving’s my No1. I never said: ‘No, I don’t have a girlfriend but I’m looking for one.’ And then someone asked: ‘Do you ever wonder why people think you’re gay?’ And I said something like: ‘Maybe because I spend half my time half naked,’ thinking: ‘They can think whatever they like, what does it matter?’ But then the next day, headlines were all: ‘Tom Daley is not gay.’ And that’s what sparked it [coming out]. Because I was not having people thinking I’d been lying.”
When he released his YouTube video, which was touchingly done, a declaration of love more than anything else, he had been in a whirlwind romance with the US screenwriter Lance Black for just over six months. “It was a real love-at-first-sight thing. But then I had to come back to England so we were just talking on the phone or WhatsApp or whatever. Then he came over eight weeks later. The first night, I took him to meet my friends and said: ‘This is my boyfriend.’ The next night we went on our first date. The next night he asked me to be his boyfriend. The night after that, after a couple of lychee martinis, he told me he loved me. He extended his trip, we were already talking about babies and weddings. So that was in the first week. It was weird. But now it’s five years later …”
The couple’s baby, Robert Ray Black-Daley, was born to a surrogate mother in July: probably the most remarkable respect in which Daley matured before his years was his desire to be a father. “I’ve been shopping for baby clothes for six years, since before I met Lance, since I was 17 or 18. There’s nothing I’ve ever been more sure of in my life than having a family. One of the things I was so mortified about, so upset about, when I came out, was that I’d never be able to have a family. But then obviously I did more research. Because there’s something so special about passing on what my parents have taught me to children of my own.”
The decision came under fire from critics of commercial surrogacy, although old-fashioned bigots were much louder, Richard Littlejohn nosing out from under a rock to declare the business not “normal”. Daley defends it very staunchly. “I always flash back to when Kanye and Kim [West and Kardashian] announced they were having a baby through surrogacy. Apparently Kim had some kind of health issue, the first [baby] was all right, and the second, but the third would be a problem. And it was all: ‘Oh my God, isn’t she so lovely having a baby.’ As soon as it was two men, the narrative quickly shifted. Lance said he expected the backlash to come more from the US than the British press. We know we are going to love that child more than anything else in the entire world. As a same-sex couple, we have to really want a child to make that child happen. There’s no glass of wine and a pizza, and then the next day, oh my goodness, I’m pregnant. You have to really want it.”
The couple live in central London: “I think Lance would feel even more homesick if it wasn’t the current political situation out in the States. Right now, he’s happy to not raise a child in that environment.” And he’s worrying about schools, because “in Plymouth, I know every school, I’d know exactly where I wanted him to go. In London, there are thousands, I don’t even know if I should be getting his name down.” I am able to share the peerless wisdom, here, that if he wants Robert Ray to go to a state school, he can just turn up when he’s five. “Yeah, I don’t know if I’d want to pay £50,000 a term. I went to a comprehensive till I was 10.” (At that point, he went to Plymouth College, a school so sporty that he was one of five pupils or ex-pupils in the London Olympics: if it had been a country, it would have come 23rd in the medals table.)
Anything remotely political is always amplified when it comes from an athlete; it’s possible that for most, the single-mindedness, focus and sheer scrutiny sporting excellence brings with it militates against throwing yourself into the fray of anything. But Daley is principled, thoughtful and outspoken, in situations that demand such qualities but rarely get them. This year, having won his fourth Commonwealth Games medal, he called on its nations to decriminalise homosexuality. It wasn’t a planned move. “I got to go to the games with my grandad, grandma, my mother and Lance, and we sat down for lunch. I looked at Lance and thought: ‘How lucky am I to be able to be married to the person I love without any worry about ramifications, to be able to represent my country at a sport I love to do, and not have to worry about getting thrown in jail?’ At the time, there were 37 countries that criminalised LGBT people – Trinidad recently has legalised. Lots of people in the UK were shocked to hear that there were countries at all where it’s illegal. People of my generation, we just don’t realise. I’ve learnt so much from Lance [who’s 20 years older] about how different it was 20 years ago in the States even, but there are so many countries in the world where it’s so dangerous, and anybody who’s out is so brave. I thought, if I can try and shine a light on that, that’s the way to change people’s hearts, that’s the way to change their minds, and change laws, and change the way people think about everything.”
Lance’s full name (Daley talks about him so much you get to feel as though you’re on first-name terms) is Dustin Lance Black; he won an Oscar in 2009 for best original screenplay with Milk, making them the only married couple, as far as I can tell, who have an Oscar and an Olympic medal in their house. High-achievers live quite peaceably together, apparently: “Being in such different fields, there’s that constant level of curiosity; but we also have so much understanding of how much work goes in to being at the top of your career. One of us will say: ‘I have to work tonight.’ ‘Fine.’ ‘I need to go to bed early tonight.’ ‘Fine.’ ‘I need to make sure that I get up at this time and have breakfast.’ ‘Fine, so long as you make me some breakfast.’”
Black has also had a fascinating life, growing up a Mormon and then escaping with his mother, who remained “super-conservative”. Both men have achieved their full potential against hurdles of grief, pressure, prejudice, attention and acclaim, a living example of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Daley’s book credits “making good decisions” – sleeping well, breathing, avocados on toast, being vegan for a day once a week, focusing on mobility, getting your blood moving, gyrotonics (this is a mixture of yoga and pilates, though that won’t help people who don’t know the difference).
It’s not a very easy sell, fitness advice from a diver; it’s such a precise skill, such an unattainable physique. “You have to be the right shape, you can’t be 7ft tall. You’d just spin really slowly. The smaller you are, the faster you spin. Believe it or not, I’m one of the taller divers in the world.” (He is 5ft 10in.) Divers have a quality of mathematicians, so erudite and accomplished that if you’re any age over eight, you are too late to even begin to understand what they do and how they do it. Daley describes dives that take a year to learn, that take on the quality of a quest: “One of the dives that I’ve learnt was a forward three and a half somersaults with one twist. My coach saw someone on YouTube doing it on a Russian swing, part of a circus act. And we had to take it from a circus to an Olympic context. It’s not quite physically possible yet to do some extra somersaults in some dives. But in the past 10 years diving has progressed faster than ever, just due to tech, facilities and learning more about the physics of it, basically.”
He is able to draw universal tips for a life well-lived out of such a specific discipline because he has a deep-rooted, almost mystical respect for the idiosyncratic: it doesn’t matter if you’re doing it right, so long as you’re doing it. It comes out when he talks about his father, which he does a lot: a man who didn’t care what people thought but also sought to delight them, who had a comedy car horn and dressed up as Santa. “He would just be silly and joke around and not care. And that’s what I think: if you want to wear an orange and green tie-dyed shirt, go for it. If that’s what you like, you do you.”
Tom’s Daily Goals is published by HarperCollins on 23 August (£16.99). To pre-order a copy for £14.44, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
