Is being too good at sport too young a curse? Of course it is

The National

15-06-2025

He was 14 years old, but so baby-faced was he, the teenager could probably have passed for being even younger.
The diver, unsurprisingly, was a phenomenon at those Olympic Games becoming, as he had, one of Team GB's youngest-ever Olympians.
In fact, even prior to Beijing 2008, he'd already been in the spotlight for a number of years.
Such a precocious talent was the Englishman, he was being interviewed by the BBC aged just 11 and qualified for the Olympics aged only 13.
There's something endlessly fascinating about watching athletes competing on the international stage despite the fact they are still children.
Every so often, an individual comes along who has mastered their sport by their mid-teens or, in Daley's case even earlier, resulting in the public watching a literal school child compete against adults.
If you're good enough, you're old enough is the adage that's consistently trotted out when stressing the point that age, particularly in sport, is irrelevant.
On a very base level, this is true.
If your sporting abilities are up to scratch then why should it matter if you're still sitting your school exams?
But Tom Daley's newly-released documentary, '1.6 Seconds', brings sharply into focus quite what it means to be both a child and an elite-level athlete simultaneously.
1.6 Seconds, which was released earlier this month, is a documentary about the British diving sensation, with the title coming from the fact it takes precisely 1.6 seconds between diving off the 10m diving board and hitting the water.
Ultimately, Daley became a five-time Olympian, with the highlight being Tokyo 2020, at which he finally became Olympic champion.
(Image: Getty Images) So while this documentary charts Daley's brilliance as a diver, it also delves into the price he paid for that success. And it was a hefty price.
It's hardly surprising that Daley became a fascination for the media. His early breakthrough, his ability to speak eloquently despite his tender age and his photogenic looks made him the perfect subject.
Things hit the skids early, though.
At those Olympic Games in 2008, Daley was partnered with Blake Aldridge who was, at the time, almost twice Daley's age and after the pair under-performed in the 10m synchro event, Aldridge essentially blamed the young Daley for their failure.
Tom Daley at the Beijing Olympics 2008 (Image: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images) Daley's life, despite his Olympian status, was then a struggle for quite some time. He endured severe bullying at school, leading to him being home-schooled, developed an eating disorder and, most traumatically, suffered the death of his father just days after his 17th birthday.
Paparazzi essentially gatecrashed Daley's father's funeral to grab photos of the teenager, something Daley describes in this documentary as feeling 'really abusive'.
Now aged 31, married with two kids and having retired from competitive diving, Daley appears a genuinely happy and content man.
But the struggles he endured to reach this point have clearly been sizeable and it's hard to ignore that so many of them came as a direct result of his athletic talent being so far ahead of his development as a person.
Inevitably, if you're only 13 or 14 years old, you're entirely unequipped to deal with challenges that many adults struggle with.
It's why, if you're a world class athlete who is still a child, sport can be such a challenging and, at times, destructive environment. And it's why so many athletes who were child stars, if that's what you'd call them, end up as ill-adjusted and damaged adults.
Daley has, it seems, come out the other side as healthy and as balanced as anyone. Perhaps it helped that it wasn't until 2021 he won his long-coveted Olympic gold medal, over a decade after his Olympic debut.
But Daley isn't the only athlete who has struggled to adjust to being a child sporting superstar.
There are, of course, several walks of life in which child stars emerge but the significant difference between sport and say, entertainment is that it's a given that fame goes hand-in-hand with appearing in films or television.
In contrast, I've never met a single athlete who began diving or kicking a ball or running round a track because they wanted fame. Rather, they did it for the love of the sport and fame was a by-product, more often than not an unwanted one, of subsequent success.
Daley is by no means an anomaly when it comes to struggling with being a very good athlete very young; the sporting world is littered with athletes who were precocious talents but the pressure and fame that was heaped upon them frankly, messed them up.
From Jennifer Capriati, the tennis player who turned professional at the age of only 13 and won Olympic gold aged just 16 before suffering many personal problems that included her being arrested several times to Kamila Valieva, the teenage figure skater who, as a 15-year-old, went into the 2022 Winter Olympics as favourite for gold but ended those Games having been handed a doping suspension and suffered a public meltdown, the perils of being very good at sport at a very young age are plentiful.
Jennifer Capriati also excelled at a particularly young age (Image: AFP via Getty Images)
It's easy to see exactly why individuals who become world class athletes while still teenagers or, in Daley's case even younger, struggle so badly with what elite sport brings.
The fame and attention can be a heavy load to bear and the constant media attention and scrutiny is something may adults are not equipped to deal with, never mind expecting a child to cope.
Having the press and the public watch your every move and having so many people invested in your success of failure would be enough to send anyone mad.
It's easy for people to trot out the line that age is only a number. Sometimes, this is entirely true. But in other cases, age isn't only a number, it's also a sign that someone isn't ready for what's about to be thrown at them.
Daley's retelling of his life story is a reminder that while excelling at sport at an unusually young age brings many positives, it also brings many, many negatives.
The Englishman has, in the end, come out the other side intact and in a good place.
Not all athletes who excelled while very young are so lucky.