AS A FEW television presenters found out, condescension is a natural but entirely inappropriate reaction to the presence of 13-year-old Tom Daley. A breakfast show host seemed about to pat Tom on the head, so blitheringly maternal did she become over the whippersnapper who could soon be Britain’s youngest Olympian. “Oh, there,” she cooed as Daley recorded his recent exploits with the confidence of a seasoned professional.

His friends at Eggbuckland Community College in Plymouth will tell you there is a schoolboy in Tom Daley, but anybody competing against him from the 10m platform at the first round of the 2008 Fina diving grand prix in Madrid this weekend would not dare make that mistake.

Not only is Daley mastering the complex art of diving, with all its technical and mental somersaults, but he is able to talk lucidly about his feelings, admit to occasional bouts of fear and still come across as a thoroughly likeable boy who just happens to be a prodigy in his spare time.

Yet before the nation gets too carried away, the route to Beijing and into the history books is still as circuitous as one of his routines. Winning two senior titles at the British diving championships put Beijing within touching distance, but a World Cup competition which doubles as a test event in the Chinese capital next month and the Olympic trials in April will decide his short-term fate.

Daley has already locked his gaze on London 2012, has even envisaged what it would be like to hear the roar and then the silence of the crowd as he makes the lonely walk out on to the platform for his first dive. He knows what he will be thinking, too. “I will just try to concentrate on my dive and believe it’s just another training session,” he says. He is there already, and still just 18. “If it goes well, I could still be competing in 2024,” he adds.

Still, the rewards for being so good so young have just hit home. Television shows, a series of interviews, a box at Chelsea for the Carling Cup semi-final courtesy of adidas, one of his sponsors, and enough attention to send any self-respecting teenager scuttling back to morning training sessions in a freezing pool. Except that among Daley’s many sporting attributes is a blessed ability to thrive in the spotlight.

“I can tell if my rivals are nervous,” he says. “It’s the way they look or if they’re breathing heavily, or don’t know what to do with themselves between dives. Lots of people buckle under pressure, but if I feel it, I can respond to it. If I have a bad dive, I make sure the next one is a good one.”

Martina Navratilova once talked wistfully about the advantages of not knowing the consequence of failure. Having finished second in his debut in a novice event barely months after taking up the sport, Daley has yet to suffer a serious setback. But confronting demons is part of the daily life of any diver. “If you land flat on a dive, you can freeze, get scared,” he says. “It happened to me quite recently, I landed flat on a twisting dive and I didn’t want to do it any more, I wanted to give up. It’s the take-off and thinking you could miss it again, that’s the problem. But you break the dive down and build it up again until your confidence comes back.”

The first reaction of Daley’s long-time coach, Andy Banks, was that Daley would never make a diver. “I actually said something a lot stronger than that,” Banks said. “I watched Tom for 20 minutes and he didn’t do anything.” Now, he says, the difficulty is persuading his protege that there might be limits. “It’s pulling him back, not pushing him forward, that’s the hard part,” he says.

At present, Daley’s 47kg is perfectly proportioned, allowing him to spin quickly round and over a central axis. He has the strength to get his body upright at the critical moment of entry, the spatial awareness to control his dive and big enough hands to punch a good hole in the water for him to slip through. “When you do a good dive, the water sucks you into the hole,” he explains. “That’s why there’s very little splash. You feel it. But you know from the splash when you’ve done a bad one.”

The problems will come if his legs, torso and arms grow asymmetrically, at different rates, so that his body becomes disproportionate and less flexible. Alexandre Despatie, a Canadian, won the Commonwealth Games title at 13 but has yet to win Olympic gold, though he has been performing to the highest level for a decade now. Mother nature will play her part in Daley’s future success; courage and determination runs in the family.

Just 18 months ago, Tom’s father Rob was diagnosed with a tumour on the brain. He told none of his three boys about his illness, let alone the odds of survival, until they found him in his hospital bed with his head swathed in bandages. When Tom became the BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year in December, Rob Daley cried for half an hour at the thought of what he might have missed. He now attends every training session and drives thousands of miles in an old VW to watch Tom compete, relying only on the sponsorship of friends and relatives to help with the bills not covered by Tom’s national lottery funding. Even as minimalist a sport as diving can be expensive.

Yet Rob and his wife, Debbie, cannot help but reflect on how brightly the road ahead has been lit. “He was born at the right time, learnt to swim at the right time, we’ve got a great facility five minutes from our home, the London Olympics was unveiled at the right time,” says Rob. “It’s all there for him.”

He has already made one vital leap upwards. Last year in Manchester, Tom could fit under the baby showers. This year, he was too tall. “He was really pleased about that,” says Banks. Maybe Tom Daley is just a little kid after all.

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