Teenage diver Daley seizes British imagination

By John Mehaffey

LONDON (Reuters) - Poised on the edge of a 10-meter board towering over a public diving pool in the southern English city of Southampton, Tom Daley looks small, isolated and even younger than his 13 years.

Hailed as Britain's youngest male Olympian before an embarrassed British Olympic Association discovered they had the wrong age for a cox at the 1960 Rome Games, Daley will represent his country in Beijing a couple of months after turning 14.

Daley has captured the British public imagination to an unusual degree, counterpointing his precocity in one of the Olympics' more spectacular events with his maturity and composure in the face of increasing media attention.

Partly as a result of the swelling interest, Daley and his coach Andy Banks have sought to dampen expectations for Beijing and preferred to look instead to the 2012 London Games.

"My aim for Beijing is to go there, have an enjoyable experience, hopefully do a good performance and by the time 2012 comes around, that's when I'm going to go for the medals," Daley told Reuters in a poolside interview after an hour on the board.

Banks said Daley's seventh place at the World Cup in Beijing this year, which qualified him for the Games, had been exceptional.

"I think realistically his ultimate goal at the moment, although he talks of doing many more Games, is to feature with the top guys in the world in London," he said in a telephone interview.

STARTLED FATHER

Even Daley's father Rob has been startled by his son's sudden celebrity. Only Kenneth Lester, an Olympic cox whose birth date had been incorrectly recorded as 1937 instead of 1947, was more youthful than Tom.

"I didn't think 13-year-old boys went to the Olympics," Daley said by telephone from the family home in Plymouth.

"That was a distant dream, I didn't think my boy would be qualifying to go. It didn't actually dawn on me until he was in the World Cup in Beijing, there is a real possibility that he is going to the Olympics.

"Everyone was saying he is the best talent this country has ever seen but no one was mentioning the Olympics."

Rob Daley took the eldest of his three sons to swimming lessons from the age of three "just for safety reasons. He never intended to be a competitive swimmer".

Tom, though, was attracted by the diving board.

"Seeing people jumping off the diving board and doing somersaults and twists, that was something that really inspired me and I wanted to be like them and to be able to do the somersaults," he said.