Tom Daley takes a giant leap as he steps up his quest for diving gold

[divingbrit]

When Tom Daley walks out of the gates of Plymouth College on Friday it will represent another milestone in his short but eventful life.

His days as a regular pupil will be over, for now at least, as he swaps his life as Britain's most famous schoolboy for that of a full-time athlete to hone the twists, somersaults and pikes that he hopes will earn him an Olympic medal this summer.

On Saturday he departs for a British Diving training camp in Southend before the start of the FINA Visa World Cup in the Olympic Aquatics Centre on Feb 20 – the official test event for London 2012 and Daley's first competition of the Olympic year.

After that it will be the diving World Series, which will take him to Dubai, Beijing, Moscow and Tijuana, Mexico, before the European Championships in Eindhoven, a training camp in Majorca and then the final Olympic holding camp at an undisclosed location in Britain.

It is quite an itinerary for someone who is still three months shy of his 18th birthday, but being away from home is something he has grown used to since the early days when he was sent on senior training camps as a 10 year-old and was so homesick that he threatened to jump out of the window. Nowadays he takes it all in his stride.

He still intends to go back to school now and then, on his occasional fleeting visits back home, if only to keep in touch with friends and inject a bit of normality and routine into his restless life, but having completed the majority of his A-level modules last month, it will be diving that will consume him in the weeks to come.

Apart from a Spanish oral examination in May, his education is to be put on hold until he returns to the classroom in September for an extra year to finish his two outstanding maths modules and "maybe chuck in another A-level".

"I wouldn't say I'm finished with school," he said. "I'm going in whenever I'm at home but, the way the diving calendar falls, whenever I'm at home seems to be either the Easter holidays or half-term so I think from now on I'm probably going to be in school for about 12 days, which isn't very much.

"We leave for the Southend training camp on Friday, and I'm not back until the end of February. Then I'm away for the World Series circuit, and then I'm back again and then away again. So it's very in and out.

"The school has been very supportive with everything I do to help me catch up. They know when to push and they know when to ease off and they know that at this time of year, leading up to the Olympics, they're not going to push me at all.

"It's just making sure that I'm comfortable with my diving. That is my priority this year and I'll go back in September to finish off all my school work."

His busy schedule between now and the Olympics is part of the reason he will be confining his participation at the World Cup to the synchro event with partner Pete Waterfield rather than taking part in the more gruelling individual competition.

"There will be about 50 divers trying to qualify for individual Olympic places and, because I and Pete have already got the Olympic spots for Great Britain, we don't need to compete," he said. "Because it's such a long competition, it's quite draining and it's hard to peak for that and then peak again for things like the World Series and the European Championships. It's more important to conserve energy."

The last time Daley was in competitive action was at the World Championships in Shanghai last July, where his fifth-place finish in the individual event sealed his Olympic qualification but also brought home the scale of his task if he is to fulfil the public expectations on his shoulders by winning individual gold in London.

He did not so much surrender his world crown to Qui Bo as have it torn from his grasp as the brilliant young Chinese diver scored a string of perfect 10s on his way to an enormous winning points total of 584.45 – nearly 80 points better than Daley managed.

Daley accepts that if Bo dives with the same machine-like consistency in London then the gold medal will most likely be his, but there is a chink in his armour that he is hoping he can exploit.

In 2009, at the World Championships in Rome, Bo was leading going into the final round but then folded under the pressure and dropped his last dive, allowing Daley to become the youngest ever world champion at the age of 15.

Unlike Daley, Bo will be making his Olympic debut in London and his psychological resilience is certain to come under examination, particularly with a partisan home crowd.

"Qui Bo is definitely the one to beat," said Daley. "It's his to throw away, really. He's got such a level of consistency. He's a perfect shape for diving. He's short, powerful and he can spin really fast and enter the water really well.

"But it will be interesting to see if he holds his nerve at the Olympics because he hasn't done an Olympics before. If you put pressure on someone and they don't like pressure, then they can buckle.

"That's the thing about diving. It's so unpredictable. In the 2008 World Cup, Sascha Klein won the individual title and then didn't even make the semi-final at the Olympics, so it's one of those sports where you can do all the hard work but it all comes down to the 1.6 seconds it takes to perform each of your six dives."

Daley's slightly under-par performance in Shanghai was mitigated by the fact that his preparations had been thrown into turmoil but the death of his father, Rob, just two months earlier, while the four new dives that he and his long-term coach, Andy Banks, had added to his list to boost his tariff, or degree of difficulty, were still a work in progress.

The winter months in Plymouth have been spent drilling them over and again, and Daley is excited at the prospect of testing them in a competitive environment.

"At the moment they are all going very well," he said. "I've been doing lots of work on them during the off season and the consistency is getting better. Because I haven't competed for a while, it's now all about getting into the season and getting used to competing again."

He is also eager to sample the home-crowd atmosphere at this month's World Cup, where he and Waterfield, who already has an Olympic silver medal from 2004, will be hoping to lay down a marker in the synchro – an event that could well offer Daley his best medal chance this summer.

"In the individual competition there are lots of divers and things can be very unpredictable, but in the synchro there are only eight teams in it so, statistically, you've got a three-in-eight chance of winning a medal."

Spoken like a true maths student, or rather an ex-maths student. For now, there is only one subject occupying Daley's thoughts.

Telegraph