LEARNING YOUR LATEST competition move from a circus trick that you spotted on YouTube is not the sort of thing you expect from an Olympic medalist but it is fair to say Tom Daley is not your average elite athlete.
A child prodigy who was an Olympian at 14, a world champion at 15 and an Olympic bronze medalist at 18, the diving superstar has never done anything by the book nor been afraid to sometimes tear it up.
He was in Dublin this weekend to take part in three competitions during Swim Ireland’s Irish Open Diving Championship in the National Aquatic Centre and thrilled the crowd in Abbotstown with his gravity-defying spins and twists.
Yet the 21-year-old British superstar wasn’t too proud to admit he suffered from his sport’s equivalent of ‘the yips’ in the wake of London 2012 and took an unorthodox but creative approach to solving them
“Do diver’s get mental blocks? Yeah, definitely,” he admitted cheerfully.
“I struggled after the Olympics with my back twister,” he revealed, referring to his move from the 10 metre platform involving two and a half back somersaults with two and a half twists.
“It was a dive I just hated, I was terrified every time I went up there,” he said. “That’s why I changed it and learnt something new.”
His replacement move is a three and a half somersault with a full twist. He was the first in the world to do it in competition and grins when he reveals how he learnt it.
“We saw it on YouTube! Someone was performing it on a Russian swing in a circus. Yeah, basically we learned a circus trick!” he laughs.
YouTube plays a big part in the life of this quintessentially modern global superstar.
Since the London Olympics, where he survived the massive pressure of being one of Britain’s ‘Faces of the Games’ to win bronze on the penultimate day, Daley has even used his YouTube channel to announce that he was “dating a man.”
A more traditional and low-key route – a written announcement in ‘The Times’ newspaper- was taken last month when he announced his engagement to American producer/director Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for the movie ‘Milk’.
‘Lance’ as he calls him, is in Dublin with him this weekend and they were over here also when Black gave a speech in Trinity College before this year’s marriage referendun.
The couple will spend Christmas in LA before Daley goes into full pre-Olympic lockdown and even wedding planning, he explained, has been put on hold while he concentrates on going for gold on Rio next summer.
And while Daley lives his life in the full glare of social media the British star somehow manages to embrace and use it to his advantage, despite suffering from serious bullying in his youth when he was called ‘Speedo Boy’.
“For young athletes I think social media is just part of our generation,” he grinned. “I don’t think about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, it’s just what everyone our age does. I don’t even listen if it’s bad (abusive), it just straight over my head!’
The downside of fame and its potential oppressiveness genuinely doesn’t seem to bother him.
“No, I love working with young divers at events like this and people are really nice generally. If they were hurtling abuse it would be different but everyone is usually really nice to me,” he said.
It’s not hard to see why as Daley is extremely pleasant and unassuming in person.
However, in a sport where courage, mental focus and aids like visualisation are vital, he does see a sports psychologist - “every three weeks” – and admits to still getting scared still in an event that sees him drop from board to water in just 1.8 seconds and hit it at 35mph.
He still has two scars on his head from the time he hit the side of the pool when he was only nine and 11 and suffers from recurring tricep injuries, including tears, from the impact of entries.
“When I was younger I used to get scared and I didn’t go up there for ages and ages but you learn from experience that once you do something wrong and get scared of it, the sooner you do it again the less scared you are.
“The longer you leave it and make it into a bigger thing it just gets worse. If you hurt yourself you’ve just got to get back up there again and do it.”
He competed to a captive audience at the NAC this weekend but endeared himself even further with his personal charm, even doing a synchronised dive with a seven-year-old Northern Ireland fan who suffers from Cystic Fibrosis.
“It’s not my first time in Ireland but my first time here and it’s a great facility,” he said.
“It could definitely hold big international competitions like the European Championships.”