DALEY STAR

Think back to Linford in Barcelona, Kelly in Athens, Thompson in LA and Redgrave, well, everywhere. The Olympics are back this year, and we have a national treasure ready for his first act. 

British gold medal hopes are a rarity, but that’s not the only reason we get so excited by sports like curling once every four years. In the main it’s due to the stupendous, behemothic and magnificent gravity of the whole occasion. Footballers can screw up but then make up for it when next Saturday comes. But if a sprinter doesn’t ‘go on the B of Bang’, as Colin Jackson puts it, he has to live with failure for another four years; and what’s more, if an athlete has a ten year career, then they may only get two shots at glory. That’s why the Olympics are so huge: it’s the ultimate test, the culmination of four years work in one moment of exertion. 

Tom Daley might just be the next big thing in Britain’s Olympic history. He will be fourteen when he competes in the diving event this summer, so, by the time he’s 18 in 2012, he might have as many gold medals as Matthew Pinsent because he competes in both the individual and synchro events. It’s one of those situations in our mad culture of creating sporting icons, a bit like “the dream that was Rome” in Gladiator. “Anything more than a whisper and it would disappear, it was so fragile.”   

Well the whispers are becoming pullout features and TV interviews as the summer draws near. The boy himself is calm, even if we ourselves are getting a bit silly. His humble confidence bears the hallmarks of Redgrave. Will he ‘arise Sir Tom’ by the time he gets his A-level results? Probably not, but we wait with baited breath for the barminess in Beijing to begin.