Tom Daley has plans. “It’s possible that I could go to five Olympics,” he says. He’s worked out that he would be 31 when 2024 comes round and it is feasible that he could still be diving. I, on the other hand, will be 51, so I doubt I’ll be covering the diving or any other sport on TV, but I am going to Beijing for the BBC in August so getting to know Tom in January was a very useful exercise.

We should all get to know Tom Daley better. As well as being a story as he dives to glory for Great Britain, he could also, if he wanted, be the saviour of teenagers in this country. “We’re not all hoodies,” he blurted from nowhere. “I get annoyed when the media makes teenagers out to be the same.” Tom Daley is no ordinary teenager, but more of that later.

As I waited at the school gates for the prodigy to appear, Rob, his father, was there with the sponsored van. We were to head home for Tom’s tea after which he was going training, again. I am in Tom’s world now, a world of training, food, and school, not dissimilar from my childhood. And in spite of that familiarity, I had still half expected Tom to have a coterie of girls around him, something like a saccharine US high school movie.

Nope, it was a cold, grey day in Plymouth and there he was, smiling but on his own, with a rucksack on his back so large that it looked like he could hide in it. Tom’s size struck me first: he is small, undoubtedly muscular, but he is diminutive and wiry in his clothes. You’d think, centre forward or scrum half, not diver, if you saw him in the playground. Then that smile, which is almost a permanent fixture. He has a rather cumbersome-looking brace on his teeth, but it doesn’t stop him smiling. The brace is coming off in June he told me, just in time I said. Perhaps the timing isn’t a coincidence.

When he was 7, Tom looked up at the diving boards at the local swimming baths one day and thought to himself “that looks fun”. He wasn’t from a family of aquatic fanatics — his father used to dive off the rocks into the sea, but that was about it. His younger brothers are rugby mad and, in a typically 8-year-old way, his brother, Ben, told me that diving is “boring”. Most of what Ben says seems to be delivered to get a reaction from Tom, but Tom usually smiles and moves on. Maybe when the cameras leave he clouts him across the head.

Tom’s talent was spotted almost immediately, which is good to know. Talent identification does happen in this country and it does work. And that is pretty much when Tom’s life as a “normal” child ended and his extraordinary life as a diver began.

The sliding doors moments of life: look up at the diving boards and think I’d like to give that a go, or go to the changing-rooms after a fun swim with your mates and have a hot chocolate and a bag of crisps. Fate made sure he looked up because Tom Daley was meant to dive.

When we get home Debbie, his mum, is making various meals. Tom is going to have scrambled eggs on toast and a yoghurt, William, 11, is having a plate of meat and vegetables, which was the day before’s Sunday roast and is put in front of him to stop him eating sweets. Ben is having some crisps. This isn’t dinner time, it’s tea. There will be more food served later after every son returns from their various training regimes.

There’s a bit of a commotion when William is told that he’s not allowed to go to rugby training because he has a project due in tomorrow that he was supposed to have been doing over the past few weeks, but has just got round to. Tom is ribbing him for this and suddenly looks every bit the 13-year-old as he teases away. Sound a bit like your house? This bit won’t: there is a calendar on the kitchen wall, a year planner, and throughout most of February there is a pink line that says “Tom in Beijing”, (for a World Cup pre-camp and the World Cup), then there are various other lines through weeks saying things such as Eindhoven Euros (which he won last week), grand prix events in Montreal and Rostock, Germany, training camps in Manchester and Leeds and then we get to August. At the time there was a question mark on August, but we now know that Tom is going to represent Great Britain in Beijing. The calendar must now say, “All going to Beijing”.

Tom is a natural in front of the camera, not a media-trained, contrived sound-biter, or a parentally pushed, eager-to-please kid. He is polite, considerate and a thinker. The only time he sounds slightly flustered is when he admits to sometimes thinking after a hard day’s training “what’s the point” in all the sacrifice. I would have been disappointed if he hadn’t admitted to moments of doubt. Thankfully, Tom’s love of the adrenalin overrides any longer term plans to quit, hence his unprompted suggestion that he could make five Olympics.

When he is on international duty he rooms with 26-year-olds. At the end of the tournament, when all the medals have been given out, he goes to bed and when he is getting up for breakfast they are coming in from the night before. He insists that they just talk about normal things, when I wonder out loud what a 26-year-old man and a boy chat about in a hotel room for a week. All the while Tom’s lucky monkey sits on the bed. He’s too superstitious to leave him behind.

Perhaps all the attention that he will receive this summer may diminish some of the innocence that this world-beater possesses. What time and fame will find hard to unhinge is the solid base that his family have given him. Tom is the product of great parenting and so much love and support you can almost feel it. On the train back to London I was full of hope after meeting him. He’s right: not all teenagers are hoodies and not all parents are getting it wrong.

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