Tom Daley (Screen capture via This Morning/YouTube)
The world has witnessed beautiful, brown-eyed Tom Daley dive into a pool as part of a competition for the last time. The Summer Olympics in Paris, where the five-time Olympian won silver in the 10m synchronized event, turns out to have been his swan dive.
“It was emotional at the end, up there on the platform, knowing it was going to be my last competitive dive,” Daley told British Vogue in an interview published Aug. 12. “But I have to make the decision at some point, and it feels like the right time. It’s the right time to call it a day.”
The 30-year-old athlete from Devon, renowned as the UK’s most decorated diver, said he had trepidations about announcing he is officially done with diving.
“It feels very, very surreal,” he told Vogue. “I felt so incredibly nervous going into this, knowing it was my last Olympics. There was a lot of pressure and expectation. I was eager for it to be done,” he said. “But when I walked out, and saw my husband [American filmmaker Dustin Lance Black] and kids [Robbie and Phoenix] and my friends and family in the audience, I was like, you know what? This is exactly why I did this. I’m here, and no matter what happens in the competition itself, I’m going to be happy.”
Daley publicly came out as gay in a YouTube video in 2013, following a tabloid headline that declared “Tom Daley, ‘I’m Not Gay.” Up until that point, he had neither directly denied nor confirmed his orientation publicly.
“It infuriated me that somebody would say that. I never wanted to be seen as lying or hiding from who I was,” Daley told the interviewer.
“With every Olympics, there are more and more out athletes,” he said, mindful of one tabulation that estimates there were 195 openly LGBTQ competitors in Paris. That’s a huge difference from a decade ago, he noted. “It’s powerful,” said Daley, while acknowledging that many closeted male athletes fear coming out and are reluctant to take that step.
“I think there is a lot of pressure for when people do come out to be an activist and to be outspoken. And sometimes that’s just not in some people’s nature,” he said. “I think this might be part of the reason why possibly more people haven’t felt as comfortable with coming out. I also think that [the world of sport] is such a heteronormative space … lots of queer kids, when they’re younger, have this automatic feeling that they shouldn’t fit into sports, so they don’t pursue them. I hope we’ll see more in the future.”
As for Daley’s past, his accomplishments on the springboard are legendary. He made his Olympic debut at Beijing 2008 at the age of 14. He won gold and bronze medals in Tokyo, bronzes in London 2012 and Rio 2016. Daley’s gold came in the 10m synchronized event in Tokyo in 2021 alongside Matty Lee. He was back to defend his title in Paris after being convinced by his son Robbie to return to the sport. Daley won silver in the French capital alongside Noah Williams.
All told, he has since won a combined total of 11 World, Commonwealth and European Championship gold medals, and was the first Team GB diver to win four Olympic medals, a record he has now surpassed with five.
Before coming out, Daley was asked why he thought he had such a large gay following.
“Probably because I am half-naked all the time,” he replied. And as proof that’s still true, his latest TikTok and Instagram posts are titled “BRAT Summer Olympics.”
Daley now has more than five million followers across his social media platforms.
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