He Was Crying on the Board.
His Coach Said He'd Never Be a Diver.
Then He Won Olympic Gold.

The Tom Daley Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"Tom Daley was nine years old, crying on the end of the board, refusing to jump. His coach looked at him and said Tom Daley will never be a diver for as long as he lives. Five Olympics later, that same coach watched him win gold. This is a story about the people who stay even when they're not sure - and what happens when doubt finally becomes belief."

- David Begnaud

Crying on the Board. The Coach Who Almost Walked Away.

Tom Daley got into diving by chance. His family lived in Plymouth near the ocean, so they wanted him to be safe in water. They saw the diving boards, wanted to give it a go, and signed him up. His first coach, Sam Grevitt, saw something in him - a real talent - and called over Andy Banks, the head of the Plymouth Diving Club. Andy was the big boss. The one everybody wanted to impress. Sam wanted Andy to see this kid.

It just so happened that the day Andy walked in was the week after Tom had hit his head on the board. Tom was in the middle of relearning the same dive. He was standing at the end of the board, crying his eyes out, refusing to jump - completely distraught. Andy looked at this eight-year-old and delivered his verdict: Tom Daley will never be a diver for as long as he lives. Tom found out about that line later. It became one of the defining facts of his career.

But Andy stayed. And over the next year or two, something changed. Tom started winning his age-group national championships by wide margins. So the coaches sent him to compete against 14 and 15-year-olds when he was 10 - to show him he couldn't win everything. He kept winning anyway. That was the turning point. Andy took him under his wing, and the sessions went from four per week to five, to six, to before and after school, to four hours a day, then six. What Andy taught from the beginning wasn't just mechanics. He taught Tom to see the water on every rotation - to be the most controlled, consistent diver possible, instead of throwing himself off and hoping muscle memory would catch him.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Andy walks in and Tom is crying on the board - ~6:35

Fourteen Years and Eighty-One Days. The Olympic Roadmap.

Tom was twelve years old, competing at the Australian Youth Olympic Festival - a competition that required athletes to be at least fourteen, but had given him a special dispensation because of his talent. Andy pulled him aside. "Do you want to go to the Olympic Games?" Tom said: of course. His whole dream was to go to the Olympics. When London 2012 was announced, he had drawn the Olympic rings in a notebook at nine years old. Andy said: no. Do you want to go to the Olympics in Beijing 2008?

Beijing was two years away. Tom was confused. Andy explained that he had written and developed a complete plan - every dive to learn, every strength benchmark to hit - to get Tom to qualify at thirteen and compete at fourteen years and eighty-one days, which was the exact age minimum to enter an Olympic competition. He had done the math. He knew the date. He knew the margin. "If you trust me, and if you allow me to believe in you to get to this point, you will be able to qualify for the Olympic Games."

In competition, Andy gave Tom three things to focus on every time: a mental cue, a physical cue, and one overall point. He taught him to treat each dive as its own separate event - not connected to the one before or the one after. In training, he ran daily "Titian" competitions where Tom raced through his lineup against teammates for a running weekly tally. Nobody won anything. But Tom never wanted to lose. He told me he still doesn't. He confirmed it with a laugh that made clear he was not kidding.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Andy's Olympic roadmap to Beijing - ~8:52

The Olympian They Rugby Tackled. Everything He Loved Went Wrong.

People assumed that coming home from the Beijing Olympics at fourteen would make you the most popular kid in school. It made Tom a target. The bullying wasn't just verbal. It was physical - rugby tackled in the field, things thrown at him. His parents eventually pulled him out of school altogether. He described it plainly and without self-pity, the way someone describes a fact they've made their peace with but haven't forgotten.

What made it harder was a pattern Tom recognized only in looking back: everything he loved, every time he got close to something good, something dark arrived with it. The Olympics gave him the world and then gave him the bullying. His dad - his biggest cheerleader, the man with the camera, the one who drove him everywhere and cheered the loudest - was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died when Tom was seventeen. And then he started falling in love, and his management pulled him aside to say that being associated with the man he was falling for would be bad for his image. Because people might think he was gay.

Tom came out at nineteen in a YouTube video because he was tired of being misquoted and tired of being afraid. Every interview, every time: do you have a girlfriend? He would say he didn't have time. Then one interview went sideways and he was quoted saying he was not gay. It infuriated him. He couldn't handle having people think he was ashamed of who he was. There weren't any openly out athletes competing in the UK at the time. There was no rule book for how to do it. He just sat down in front of a camera and told the truth.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The bullying after Beijing and everything that went wrong - ~18:26

18th Best in the Country. What His Father Saw.

Before Tom's first senior national championships at nine years old, he went to his dad terrified of coming last. His dad asked: how many people are in the competition? About eighteen. His dad said: even if you come dead last and bomb out on absolutely everything, you are going to be the 18th best diver in the whole country. There will only be seventeen other people in all of Britain who are better than you. And that's pretty darn cool. Tom walked into that competition without any pressure. He won the under-eighteen title.

His parents never put pressure on him. They didn't even take time to understand the technical details of diving. They were just there to clap and cheer. His dad filmed everything - from the age of nine, documentary crews were following Tom as an Olympic hopeful, and on top of that his dad recorded everything himself. There is footage all the way up to the last two days before Tom turned seventeen, four days before his dad died of brain cancer at the age of forty.

Tom looks back now and says he thinks there was a reason for all of it. A reason he qualified for the Olympics at fourteen - because his dad didn't get to see London 2012. A reason he was the youngest person ever to win a diving world title when he was fifteen - because his dad never got to see him win another one. All the things his dad did get to see: the early competitions, the red carpets, the little trips up to London together. Tom is now three years away from the age his dad was in those old photos. He said it quietly. You could see it land.

▶ Watch on YouTube: "18th best in the country" and Tom's father - ~24:12

Rio. The Parking Lot. Your Story Doesn't End Here.

Going into Rio 2016, Tom was twenty-two years old - the peak age for a diver, physically and mentally. The preliminary round went perfectly. He set an Olympic record. Everything was clicking. The next day, the semifinals: it fell apart completely. Dive after dive, worse and worse and worse. He ended up coming eighteenth and did not make the final. He described it as the worst day of his diving career - years of work, years of sacrifice, and it all collapsed in one afternoon. He came eighteenth. The same number his dad had used to teach him that last place wasn't the end of the world.

He found his partner Lance in the parking lot outside the diving pool and just held on. Lance told him: this wasn't for nothing. Your story doesn't end here. Maybe you didn't win an Olympic gold medal here because your future children are meant to see you win an Olympic gold medal. Lance is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter - he wrote and produced the film Milk. He said it the way a filmmaker says things: you need the darkness before the sunrise. This is where act two begins.

After Rio, they got married. They had their son Robbie. At the Tokyo Olympics - the COVID Games, with no crowds, no family, no one in the stands - Tom won Olympic gold in the synchronized platform event. Robbie wasn't there in person. But at Paris 2024, both Robbie and his younger brother Phoenix sat in the stands and watched their father dive at an Olympic Games. And according to Robbie, he wants Tom to come back for LA 2028. Tom said those conversations are happening every morning when he wakes up.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Rio falls apart and Lance in the parking lot - ~30:12

Knitting. The Gold Medal. It's About Bloody Time.

Andy Banks had one rule about fear that he passed down through all of Tom's career: the day you stand on the end of that diving board and you're not scared, something is going to go wrong. The fear is what stops you from making mistakes. As soon as you get complacent, that's when you start making them. Tom carried that through five Olympic Games and a career spanning twenty-six years of training for a dive that takes one point six seconds to complete.

Tokyo was the ultimate test of it. A COVID Olympics - no socializing, no family, daily testing, an Olympic village full of empty time and too many chances to overthink. Tom had learned to knit at a World Championship in 2019 and had kept it up. At Tokyo, knitting became essential. He genuinely believes it was the reason he was able to win Olympic gold. Without it, he doesn't know what he would have done with that much silence and that much pressure and nothing to do with his hands.

When he won - four Olympics in, five if you count the one that came after - Andy's message was four words: it's about bloody time. Andy had been there since the beginning. He watched the nine-year-old cry on the board. He drew up the Beijing roadmap. He coached Tom through London and Rio and every competition and heartbreak in between. The doubt had turned into something else a long time ago. Tom said: just living your authentic life and being visible is sometimes the most valuable form of activism. He was talking about being a gay man in public. But I think he was also, without knowing it, describing everything Andy Banks did - the quiet, unglamorous, year-after-year act of showing up for someone you believe in.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Fear, knitting, and the Tokyo gold medal - ~40:37

Stories like Tom's are what we do.

Subscribe to The Do Good Crew newsletter - free, weekly, and always worth opening.