Tom Daley ready to take on the big boys at the London 2012 Olympics

[divingbrit]

A ripple of applause went round the Ponds Forge diving pool as Tom Daley hit the water during his training session in Sheffield.

It was not his best entry. It was pretty splashy by the world champion's standards. But the dizzying blur of twists and somersaults represented a significant milestone in the 15 year-old's journey to the London 2012 Olympics.

At last, Daley can claim to have the world's hardest dive in his gravity-defying repertoire – the 2½ somersaults with 2½ twists in the pike position. Now he can play with the big boys.


He has, of course, been playing with them for some time, and beating them at the World Championships in Rome last summer, but he has always been disadvantaged by the lower degree of difficulty, or 'tariff', of his dive list and has had to rely on rivals making mistakes. Until now.

Since his victory in Rome, he and his coach, Andy Banks, have been hard at work slowly building up the elements of the '2½ twist' in the training harness and on the lower boards of his Plymouth pool before transferring them to the 10-metre platform.

The fruits of their labour will be given a public airing at the British Gas National Cup when Daley performs the dive for the first time in competition.

"The hard bit is getting everything done in the amount of time you have before you hit the water," he said. "There's so much happening, you're really using every muscle in your body.

"It took me two or three months before I could do it on the 10-metre but since then I've been doing it on the 10-metre every day in training. I'm hoping that in the adrenalin of competition I can jump that little bit higher and get the dive in."

The dive was invented by fellow Briton Leon Taylor, a synchro silver medallist at the 2004 Athens Olympics, and is considered the ultimate test of agility and strength by packing so many elements into the 1.8-second descent from platform to water.

It is only recently that Daley was deemed strong enough to attempt it. The technical learning has had to be supplemented by a rigorous weights regime. The reward is the highest tariff of any dive, which multiplies the score for execution, but the extreme difficulty also carries a serious risk of failure.

At the 2008 Beijing Games, it delivered the gold medal to Australian Matthew Mitcham, whose score of 112.10, which included four 10s, was the highest single-dive score in Olympic history. In Rome last summer he attempted it again and flopped, destroying any hopes of a medal.

Daley and Banks are also working on two other high-tariff additions to the routine – an arm-stand back triple somersault piked and a back 3½ somersaults piked.

"Without the extra tariff, Tom's always going to be the underdog and relying on other people not doing as well as they possibly can do," Banks said.

"His performance of the easier dives is usually very, very good and he normally scores very highly. But if the best divers in the world are doing the same and they have got more tariff, the maths comes into play and you lose."

The priority this year will be to perfect the new dives rather than win medals and titles.

"The more I do it, the more I'll be comfortable with it and, hopefully, get higher marks," said Daley. "Hopefully, I'll be pretty used to it by the time London comes and I'll almost be able to do it with my eyes shut."

telegraph.co.uk