Tom Daley announces retirement
The world has witnessed beautiful, brown-eyed Tom Daley dive into a pool as part of a competition for the last time. The Summer Olympics in Paris, where the five-time Olympian won silver in the 10m synchronized event, turns out to have been his swan dive. “It was emotional at the end, up there on the platform, knowing it was going to be my last competitive dive,” Daley told British Vogue in an interview published Monday. “But I have to make the decision at some point, and it feels like the right time.
It’s the right time to call it a day.” The 30-year-old athlete from Devon, renowned as the UK’s most decorated diver, said he had trepidations about announcing he is officially done with diving. “It feels very, very surreal,” he told Vogue. “I felt so incredibly nervous going into this, knowing it was my last Olympics.
There was a lot of pressure and expectation. I was eager for it to be done,” he said. “But when I walked out, and saw my husband [American filmmaker Dustin Lance Black] and kids [Robbie and Phoenix] and my friends and family in the audience, I was like, you know what?
This is exactly why I did this. I’m here, and no matter what happens in the competition itself, I’m going to be happy.” Daley publicly came out as gay in a YouTube video in 2013, following a tabloid headline that declared “Tom Daley, ‘I’m Not Gay.” Up until that point, he had neither directly denied nor confirmed his orientation publicly. “It infuriated me that somebody would say that.
