The best piece of advice young Tom Daley received last week came from a fellow
Olympian. “Just enjoy every minute of it and try to remember as much of it
as you can,” said Kenneth Lester. As the youngest ever British male
Olympian, back in the days of hooped cotton singlets and smart blazers,
Lester speaks from experience. Forty-eight years on, he still regrets that
no photographic or even written record remains of his brief, but historic,
Olympic career as a cox of the pair in Rome in 1960.
Lester and Daley, the two youngest British male Olympians, met for the first
time last week, one reflecting happily on an achievement still vividly
remembered across the years, the other blissfully ignorant of the limits to
his own future. Lester had felt uncomfortable about claiming any of the
limelight from the boy proclaimed in the euphoria of his qualification for
Beijing last weekend as the youngest ever Olympian. Daley, chirpy as ever,
had no such inhibitions. He donned the blazer with the Union Jack and Rome
1960 stitched on the breast pocket and the rowing singlet, leafed through
Lester’s Olympic passport and the two programmes, memorabilia from a
parallel sporting universe. “I don’t know about me advising him,” said
Lester later. “He was minding me.”
Daley will be 14 years and 81 days old by the start of the Games in Beijing in
August. Lester was aged 13 years and 144 days when he competed in Rome as
part of the Great Britain rowing squad, but his date of birth had been
recorded wrongly on the British Olympic Association database. He was born in
April 1947, not 1937. In 1960, he was 6st 12lb, wet through and had to carry
a sandbag in the boat to make up the right weight. “I think one report
described me as ‘thrilled to the core’ to be selected for the Games,” he
said. Daley is 7½st and thinks his Olympic trip will be “brilliant” as long
as he competes well.
Lester produces two airmail letters, one to his parents and one to his
brother, both written in the round, concentrated hand of the child. You can
imagine the 13-year-old Lester, who one moment was dining with Don Thompson,
a soon-to-be Olympic champion, the next marvelling at the graceful figure of
an unknown American boxer called Cassius Clay, sitting in his room in the
Olympic village and being overwhelmed by the vast gap between the adventure
and his ability to express it. In some senses, it is still the way.
Tom Daley will have no such problems; cameras will follow him everywhere,
e-mail, text-message and mobile phone will shrink the distance between
Beijing and Plymouth for the minority of family and friends who are staying
behind. But Lester still urges Daley to keep a diary, however trivial.
In return, Daley asks Ken Lester about his training regime. “I didn’t have to
do much,” says Lester. “I don’t remember any particular coaching before we
qualified for the Olympics. After we did, people became interested, but we
just put in as many miles as we could on the water. My job was to make sure
the boat went straight and I like to think I managed that.”
Third in their heat, the University of London pair of Jeff Reeves and Stewart
Farquharson were just rowed out of the final places in the repechage. Lester
was too busy enjoying the ride, including trips to the Vatican and Sorrento,
to recall the disappointment. But that was not the end of the Lester
family’s Olympic history. Ken’s younger brother, Richard, won a silver medal
in the British VIII 16 years later in Montreal.
In 1960, the Olympics were still a pastime, not a career. At the opening
ceremony, the girls took off their shoes to ease their discomfort as they
waited in the main stadium. As the smallest, Lester was at the front,
dwarfed by huge wrestlers and weightlifters. After he left school, Ken
Lester went into the family business, owning a chain of butchers shops in
Oxfordshire, before selling up in 1992 and buying a removal business. His
interest in rowing has survived through the Wallingford Rowing Club and as a
member of a crew which set the record for the fastest row from Oxford to
London in 1972.
For him, the Olympic Games remain a gloriously unexpected stitch in the
tapestry of his life. “I was in the right place at the right time,” he says.
“I was just lucky. A ten-year-old was coxing another of the boats in the
trials. If he had won, he would be the youngest British Olympian. It was
just a great adventure.”
Daley’s journey is only just beginning, but it will need careful choreography.
By finishing in the top eight in the recent World Cup event in Beijing, he
automatically qualified for the Games, an unexpected speeding up of a career
which was already on fast-forward.
Daley qualified for the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne at the age of just 11,
but went to Australia only for the experience, not for the competition. Left
to himself, he would have gone for gold, but he admits it was probably the
right decision to hold back. In his first full season of senior competition,
Daley has been a revelation, competing hard for medals in the grand prix
events and challenging the Chinese divers at every available opportunity.
The one blip on his record came before the world series event in Madrid last
year when he suffered from what divers call Lost Move Syndrome and golfers
call the yips. Quite simply, Daley forgot his dive, a moment of terror at
any time, let alone at the top of a narrow 10m platform.
“The diver believes he can’t trust himself any more, which is pretty scary,”
says coach Andy Banks. “But we put a plan together and through the Visa
programme we contacted the British gymnast Beth Tweddle, who said that a
similar thing happened in her sport, and rebuilt the whole process. It took
time but he trusted us.”
The problem now is to slow him down, to try and weave some sense of normality
back into a young life which is already teetering on the edge of celebrity.
“Everything’s fresh for Tom at the moment,” says Sir Steve Redgrave. “The
world’s media is starting to track him down and that’s positive for him and
the sport, but it can be negative too if you start believing your own hype.
It’s not an issue between now and Beijing, but it will need to be monitored
through to London in 2012.”
To help with the process, Redgrave and Paralympic legend Tanni Grey-Thompson
will act as mentors as part of a scheme for talented young athletes set up
and financed by Visa with an eye to 2012. “We can help with little things,
if he wants it,” adds Redgrave. “What the Games meant to me and Tanni, the
magnitude of the whole thing.
“The Olympics is another level, but it’s important that Tom’s not scared of
it. It’s what we all trained for. Tom’s very young, but he has got a good
supportive team around him and we’re part of that team.”
Tom was back in his home town of Plymouth on Friday, too exhausted to go back
to school after three weeks in Beijing, but anxious to catch up with his
friends, if not all of his school-work. Eggbuckland Community College will
play an important part in anchoring Daley’s Olympic ambitions. His coach,
Andy Banks, has already had a meeting with the school, Tom’s parents, Rob
and Debbie, and the England Institute of Sport to plan an educational
programme which will fit around his training and competition schedule to
Beijing.
“Take this last month, we’ve lost almost four weeks out of school,” says
Banks. “Then there’s the European Championships in a fortnight’s time,
that’s another 10 days, and three world series events, each a week, before
Beijing.”
Daley has already stopped the options he won’t be taking at GCSE and the
school is hiring a teaching assistant to coordinate and mark his work
through a personalised internet site. On the road to Beijing, Daley, like
all Olympians, will have access to the English Institute of Sport’s array of
physiotherapists, psychologists and nutritionists. Would he need a
nutritionist, given the temptation of 24-hour catering in the Olympic
Village? “No,” Daley replies, patting his stomach. “You can tell when you
get podgy.”
It is now 3.15pm, time for training at the Central Park Pool in Plymouth. Rob
Daley shakes his head at how life has worked out. One moment, he is battling
a life-threatening tumour on his brain, the next he is travelling the world
in obeisance to the astonishing talent of his middle son. When Tom became
the BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year, Rob cried for half an hour at
what he might have missed. Tom is not just a perfect physical shape for
diving, he is blessed with the spatial awareness of the gymnast and the
mentality of a boxer. Yet neither of his parents had any notable athletic
talent.
At the World Cup, Daley needed every ounce of his competitive drive in the
closing stages of qualification. Having missed a dive, he needed to nail his
final one to secure his place in the top eight and automatic qualification
for the Games. At the side of the pool, Banks wasa little nervous. This was
a dive upgraded in difficulty and learnt only recently. Daley hit it
perfectly, breaking the 100-point mark. “A few years ago, if he had missed a
dive, the toys would have gone out of the pram and there would have been
tears and all sorts,” says Banks.
“This time, he just said, ‘Forget it’. He has only learnt that in the last few
weeks. He knows he’s got an extraordinary talent and he’s enjoying it.
“But the great thing is that the confidence of the whole team has gone up.
There’s a massive feelgood factor in British diving at the moment. Tom has
helped to lift the whole spirit.”
The effects of jet lag and euphoria, though, dictated a light load in the pool
on Friday afternoon, no work from the 10m platform. Lester and his wife,
Ros, watch from the gallery, transfixed by the scampering figure who is so
quick back up the steps that he takes at least 20 more dives per session
than anyone else.
Even from a near lifetime away, Lester recognises the uncomplicated confidence
of youth, the sense that life can get no better and sport no easier. Tom
Daley will be a deadly foe in Beijing. And watching back at home in
Wallingford, the cheer of the youngest British Olympian will echo all the
way to China.
Britain’s Teen Olympians: higher, faster, stronger and ... younger
Richard Lewis
CECILIA COLLEDGE The 11-year-old ice skater competed at Lake Placid in
1932, making her the youngest ever Olympian. Colledge, who has lived in the
USA for over 50 years, said this week of 1932, ‘I will never forget the
journey across. We travelled by ship from London and it took a week. After
the Olympics we went to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal to give exhibitions at
carnivals and after that I came home and I went straight back to school.’
She returned four years later to the Games in Berlin where she won silver at
the age of 15. She eventually settled in the USA where she became a coach
and in 1980 was inducted to the US Figure Skating Association Hall of Fame
KEN LESTER Lester was 13 years and 144 days when he coxed the men’s
pair at Rome in 1960. The boat was eliminated in the heats. The BOA
recorded his year of birth as 1937, a mistake, revealed last week, which
shows the former butcher from Oxford is recognised as Britain’s youngest
male Olympian
SHARRON DAVIES A silver medallist in the women’s 400m individual
swimming medley in Moscow in 1980, it had been four years earlier in
Montreal when she made her name. At only 13, she competed in the 200m
breastroke, the start of an amazing Olympic career which saw her back at the
Games in Barcelona in 1992. ‘I was a real prodigy,’ Davies, right, recalled.
‘I was very lucky to go to an Olympics when I was very little and I was very
lucky to go to another one when I was 30’
COLIN JONES In Montreal in 1976 when he was 17, the Welshman became
the youngest British boxer to compete at an Olympic Games. Amir Khan was
fractionally older when he represented Great Britain in Athens in 2004. A
welterweight, Jones was beaten 5-0 in the third round by Victor Zilberman,
of Romania, who progressed to win the bronze medal. Jones was regarded as
one of the hardest welterweights of his time – he won 23 of his 26
professional victories by a knockout. He became the European champion and
had three world title attempts before retiring in 1985
