Coming Up for Air by Tom Daley

Author:Tom Daley [Daley, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Kindness

I remember the first national competition that I went to. I was 10 years old. It was the Senior National Championships and when we got the list of the contestants, there were eighteen of us on the list and many of them were a lot older than me. I felt sick to my stomach with nerves; everywhere I looked there were tall divers springing off the boards, twisting through the air effortlessly and landing gracefully without a splash in the pool.

‘I’m so nervous. What if I do badly? What if I don’t perform my dives as well as I do in training?’

Dad always had a way of making me feel better.

‘Tom, there are eighteen divers in this competition. If you come last, you will be the eighteenth best in the whole country. How cool is that?’

‘You’re right. That’s actually bloody brilliant.’

Instantly, all the pressure was off; it just slid away like water, evaporating in seconds, which probably contributed to me winning the under 18 national title and finishing third in the senior category for the whole of the UK that day. But I knew that regardless of whether I did well or badly, both my parents would treat me exactly the same. Even the most diabolical dives got a clap, a cheer, or even sometimes happy tears from my dad. Mum always said it was great like she believed it, regardless of how good the diving was. My parents were smart enough to know to not pressure or challenge me.

At quite a young age, I became my own worst critic if I was doing badly in training or if a competition did not go as it should. Once I had learned and executed a dive perfectly, I always wanted to recreate it in any competition. Sometimes I managed it but often, I made mistakes.

‘That was awful, really rubbish,’ I would mutter afterwards. ‘I dived really badly.’

‘Really, what do you think went wrong? I thought it looked great,’ Dad would say.

I would then roll off a list of what I felt had not gone well.

From the start, I had the dogged determination and drive to win. A series of silver and gold trophies would sit glistening on the poolside and I wanted to add more and more of them to my special shelf at home. It was addictive and like a drug to me; the more I won, the more I wanted to win.

Some days, I hated learning new dives. I was scared. Often I would storm out of the pool and climb into my Dad’s van, crying and muttering about how I couldn’t do it and that the dive was too hard.

‘You can go back into the pool and try it, or we can go and have a McFlurry at McDonald’s. It’s your choice,’ he would tell me, shrugging his broad shoulders. ‘I quite fancy an ice cream.’

More often than not, he would just be turning the key in the ignition and I would go back to the pool and have a go.

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