Proud Tom Daley makes dream come true: “Gay man and Olympic champion”


At his fourth Olympic Games, Tom Daley fulfills his big dream: In synchronized jumping he wins gold together with Matty Lee. After his triumph, it gushes out of him. As a gay husband, as a father, as a great role model, he encourages us with moving words.

“I’m a gay man and also an Olympic champion.” Tom Daley found his voice at the press conference after the men’s synchronized jumping competition from the ten-meter tower. “And it makes me feel very empowered because when I was younger I felt like I would never achieve anything because I am who I am.” They are sentences with charisma, full of pride, self-confidence and confidence. “I hope that every young LGBT person out there can see that no matter how alone you feel, you are not alone. You can achieve anything.” They are words that should encourage others.

Before that in the hall: The British national anthem sounds, the few teammates gathered sing along loudly “God save the Queen”, but tears flow from the man at the top of the podium, he sobs under his mouth and nose. “I couldn’t even sing along anymore. I just cried. I just can’t believe it.” Daley is completely exhausted after the award ceremony, he talks excited and over-the-top in the BBC interview. The diver superstar and social media star with 2.1 million followers on Instagram and 895,000 subscribers on Youtube is Olympic champion. Finally.

“My son saw me become an Olympic champion on TV. There is nothing that feels better than that,” said the father of three-year-old Robbie Years. A dream comes true. “

“My son and my husband love me”

The 27-year-old is already participating in the Olympic Games for the fourth time; in 2008, at the age of 14, he was seventh and eighth – and even then he was jumping into the hearts of fans. Now, in Tokyo, he is competing with Matty Lee in synchronized diving from the ten-meter tower and after two bronze medals in London in 2012 and in Rio 2016, he is finally getting the longed-for gold.

It is the last gold medal Daley was missing from the collection. He is already three times world champion – in 2009 as the youngest jumper of all time – five times European champion and four times winner of the Commonwealth Games. But it is also the gold that in the end no longer put him under such pressure. Because he sets other priorities. “I think every athlete is lying who says he doesn’t want to win an Olympic gold medal. But at the end of the day I’m a father and a husband,” he told the Sun. “I used to define myself by how good I was at diving, but now there are other things in my life that are just as important.”

He means his private life, his marriage to the American filmmaker and Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black, her son Robert Ray, who was born in June 2018. “Thanks to this perspective that my son and my husband will love me, no matter how well I jump, I can do my best and am able to just enjoy it,” he told the Sun before Tokyo. Daley regularly takes his fans with him, gives family insights and answers questions with Black Fan. His life away from the pool causes even more buzz than his hugely successful athletic career.

Even as a child he was accompanied by a TV station, the great talent was already hyped back then. How much is shown by an anecdote from his youth that his jump partner Lee told at the press conference: “I was a huge fan. I remember running up to him to ask for photos and autographs.” Lee is only four years younger. “There’s a photo of me and Tom around the year from Beijing and it’s funny because I’m just a kid with a big head. We put it together with another photo that’s more recent. It’s funny, like yourself change things. All these years I’ve been a fan, a little kid who looked up to him. Now we’re best buddies and Olympic champions. ” For Lee, at the age of 23, it is the first Olympic start that he crowns with gold.

“That someone is a man”

After Daley’s participation in Beijing, the hype keeps getting bigger. And draws wide circles, he is immensely popular in the gay scene. The popularity skyrocketed than he did in December 2013 a small YouTube video with great explosive power published: “In the spring of this year my life changed, and very much,” he says in the clip that shows him sitting comfortably on a couch with pillows in the background in the colors of the British flag. “I’ve met someone who makes me happy and gives me security. It feels great,” the then 19-year-old continued. Then he takes a deep breath: “That someone is a man.” Tom Daley is coming out and the video has been clicked almost 13 million times since then.

The man in 2013 is the one Daley has been married to since May 2017: Dustin Lance Black, 20 years older. After his husband’s Olympic victory, he posted a video of himself and Daley’s mother on Instagram, with whom he watched the competition together: Both of them completely freaked out, the video is captioned with the words “I said that you can hear us from Canada become!”

Like millions of fans and also Daley and Lee themselves, the two have to tremble until the end. The British beat the Chinese Cao Youan and Chen Aisen very thinly – 1.23 points separate gold and silver, bronze goes to Russians Aleksander Bondar and Viktor Minibajew. In doing so, you are breaking the Chinese dominance in your sport, all four gold medals previously went to China. “We were totally in the flow, everything worked together,” said Daley after the triumph. A second one could follow: Daley will also start in the individual jump from the ten-meter tower. The qualification, in which the Germans Timo Barthel and Jaden Eikermann also compete, is on August 6th, the final one day later.

Like many Olympic champions, Daley is someone who cannot believe it. In doing so, if only it were that simple, he followed his motto: “I’m pretty impulsive in this regard. It doesn’t matter whether it’s going to be at the Olympic Games for the fourth time, learning to knit and crochet, or dad too I’m a big dreamer, but I don’t set any limits on what I can achieve either, and I think I’ve just never done that before. ” His coming out, his son and his Olympic victory prove it.

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