The jumper Tom Daley, the darling of the British Olympic team, did not want his first gold at a Games, obtained last Monday in his fourth participation, to suffer a scratch.
But where other athletes would have pulled a simple box, Daley took advantage of the morning after his victory to knit a custom sleeve.
Personalized for the occasion with the Union Jack on one side and the flag of Japan on the other, the case alone suffices to explain why thousands of his compatriots celebrated Daley's feat as if he were on top of the podium. in Tokyo was one of their own.
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Since his first appearance at the Olympics at just 14 years old, Tom Daley has transcended the limits of sport and has carved out a privileged position in the collective imagination of a country that reveres stories of achievement. Despite practicing a relatively minority discipline, the jumper embodies the values that British society aspires to project: openness, tolerance and ambition to progress.
The United Kingdom has seen him grow and has closely followed the usual milestones of any teenager, but also the extraordinary evolution of a young man who has challenged stuck taboos of sport, such as homosexuality.
When in December 2013 she announced, on her own YouTube channel, that she was in a relationship with a man, she achieved more for the rights of the LGTBI collective than many media campaigns and the samples that she has usually shared of her life with her husband for four years, producer and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, with whom he has a son of three, have managed to revise the concept of family in the 21st century.
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A post shared by Tom Daley (@tomdaley)
As a good millennial,
dominate social media.
He was one of the first athletes with a regular video blog and knows what to sell and how in each post, through a combination of workouts and snippets from his personal life, but also with the specific account he opened in September
about her love of knitting, the name of which is quite a declaration of intent: 'Made with love, by Tom Daley'.
He says that it was the needles that have "allowed him to maintain his sanity" in the frenzy of high competition and his creations show everything from colorful garments for himself, as well as for his husband and son, to dresses that imitate Gucci creations and, even a crocheted unicorn for his little niece.
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A post shared by Tom Daley (@madewithlovebytomdaley)
Achieving the serenity that he displays at 27, however, has not been easy, as is often the case with great sports biographies. Despite the carefree image that he shows on his social platforms, among the disappointments of his career is the bronze in the previous Games, those of Rio de Janeiro, after the third position obtained four years before in the home Olympics, those of London. His personal life has also been marked by serious trances such as losing his father, Robert, to a brain tumor at the age of 40, just days after the jumper turned 17.
Daley himself has admitted that one of the disappointments he has to live with is that his father, his great support from the beginning of his career, who had accompanied him practically everywhere almost to the end, could never see him in a Olympic podium. In fact, the athlete's son, who bears the surname of Daley and that of her husband, is named Robbie in honor of his father.
The stage at school was especially traumatic for the jumper, who suffered severe bullying that would force him to change centers, precisely due, according to his family, to the envy that his rise to stardom caused among some of his classmates. After his popularity skyrocketed after he became the “Beijing baby”, he received constant threats such as having his legs broken and, after repeatedly being thrown by objects, he was forced not to even be able to go outside. playtime.
The great personal revolution would come after the London Games, when at a dinner in Los Angeles in March 2013, organized by a friend to celebrate being awarded the Nickelodeon Award chosen by children, he met Black, winner of a Oscar for the screenplay for the movie
Milk,
about gay rights activist Harvey Milk. Despite the 20-year age difference, both confess that the crush was instantaneous and, despite the fact that the distance would cause a temporary separation in 2016, a year later they would formalize their union with a wedding in a castle in the county of Devon, just barely 50 kilometers from Plymouth, the hometown of an Olympic champion who writes his own rules.
