• Diving chief fears Daley burn-out
"The teenager from Plymouth is already considered one of Britain's best hopes for gold in London after qualifying for this year's Games at the age of 14.
But Steve Foley told BBC Radio 5 Live: "We have no idea if he'll go any further after Beijing.
"The constant media expectation will take its toll. We need to be careful and try to balance things."
Daley shot to stardom this year when he booked his place in the British team for Beijing. He then followed that achievement by winning the European Championships.
As a result, he has received numerous requests for interviews and will be under intense scrutiny in China as he seeks to win a medal in the individual and synchronised 10m platform events.
Foley said managing Daley's media commitments will be key to the teenager's progress." [
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• Tom shows world just what he can do
"Westcountry diving sensation Tom Daley perfected some 10-metre somersault routines in front of awestruck crowds at a showcase for the best competitors preparing for the Olympics.
The 14-year-old sporting prodigy from Plymouth, who will face the cream of the crop in the diving arena at the Beijing Olympics next month, gave a demonstration of his skills at an Olympic Diving Media Day at Pond's Forge International Sports Centre in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. He will be the youngest athlete to compete at the worldwide sporting event.
The young sporting star, who has just sat his mock GCSEs, is now focused on bringing home a medal from the Games, despite admitting in a recent interview that he would be more likely to bring home the glittering gold medal at the London Olympics in four years' time.
Tom, who trains daily at Plymouth Diving Club, became the European diving champion in March this year and with that, he found world fame.
The teenager is completely savvy with the media attention and performed to his usual high standard yesterday at Sheffield's Olympic-sized swimming pool.
He joined his diving partner Blake Aldridge, who will also be competing for Great Britain.
The conscientious sportsman loves diving as it gives him the same adrenaline rush as a fairground ride.
He said: “You jump off a really high height, you get the same adrenaline rush as a roller-coaster. You do loop-the-loops as you would on a roller-coaster.
“Each training session is like going to a theme park for me.
“Rather than it being a chore, I really enjoy going and cannot wait to get there.”
Tom will jet off to Beijing later this month to prepare himself for the biggest competition of his young life." [
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• Diving sensation Daley still has medal dream
"Teenager Tom Daley says age will be no barrier to him succeeding in the Beijing Games next month.
'An Olympic medal is the ultimate in anyone's career,' said the 14-year-old, who has been selected in the individual 10metre platform and the synchronised equivalent with Blake Aldridge.
'It's what you dream of. It's something I've always wanted and I don't know what I'd do if it was to come true. I do feel quite young - the next youngest in the team is 19 - but then I've worked and trained hard for it.'
And looking ahead to the 2012 Games in London, Daley - the youngest ever European champion - added: 'To have it in your own country is absolutely amazing. Hopefully I could win a medal then - and, if all goes to plan, the gold.'" [
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• Silent partner Blake happy to join diving sensation Daley's bandwagon
"Blake Aldridge will share a room with Tom Daley in the Olympic Village. All Olympians must share rooms and it is a tradition within diving that synchronized pairs room together.
They will go to bed at the same time, synchronize their alarms to wake at
the same time and will eat together. That is how it is with synchronized diving partners at major events. It comes with the territory.
Except that Aldridge and Daley are not your common or garden synchro pair. Daley is a celebrity because of his precociousness. When he dives for the first time in Beijing, he will be 14 years 84 days, the youngest British competitor in any sport for 48 years.
Blake is no boy, nor any celebrity. He is 26, a man who was on a high board before Daley was born and failed to make two Olympic Games teams by a single place before Tom came along.
He missed out again this year on selection for the 10metres platform because of Daley and his own contemporary, Peter Waterfield, and would probably have ended his 21 years on the boards without fulfilling his dream of becoming an Olympian until handed his opportunity in the synchro." [
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• Phil Hogan Meets Tom Daley, Britain's Diving Prodigy
"Even at 5ft 3in, Tom Daley, 14, is easy to spot, hemmed in by TV crews and lunchtime idlers in the sunny environs of the Mall in central London - straight-backed and shining for the cameras like the boy wonder the Olympic people say he is, displaying his dental braces as he turns on his Year 9 grin, an empty Diet Coke bottle dangling from his hand. Tom is doing his bit to help publicise the 2012 Games - or at least the big street party along here at the end of August, as part of the handover hoopla following Beijing. By then Tom, who qualified for the diving squad in February, will have become the second-youngest British male Olympian ever (the dream scenario of being the youngest was dented by the late discovery of a 13-year-old rowing cox from 1960). That seems amazing enough, but people are already asking: can he win a medal? Can he?
The event is winding down here. Boris Johnson has bumbled in and out of the proceedings on his bicycle, and the woman they've hired to dress up as a novelty 2012 windbreak is posing for a few final snaps. Sebastian Coe - momentarily upstaged when President Bush's motorcade came gunning by a few minutes ago, turning heads with its black bulletproof limos and SUVs and outriders, US flags whipping the air - can now be heard telling the BBC why Visa, credit-card giant and event sponsor, is crucial to the national effort.
I say hello to Tom and his dad Rob, and we head across St James's Park for lunch, flanked by two PR minders. Tom seems unruffled by all the recent media attention - hardened against distraction, one imagines, by a life of discipline and competition and foreign travel (he enthuses about his trips to Australia and Mexico - he's got a great tan) and all the other character-building extremes that can turn a boy into a man of the world.
He has already grasped, though, that the more extraordinary life becomes, the more being ordinary appreciates in value. His friends treat him like a normal person, he says - 'which I am, when I'm not diving'; he attends a 'normal' school in Plymouth, which is 'very supportive'; and he and his brothers (Ben, nine, and William, 12) all get on each other's nerves at home, just like normal brothers. Well yes, I say, but he must be abnormally popular with girls! He grins. He has a lot of old friends who are girls, but doesn't get time to meet many new ones, 'but when I can, I do...' He reddens slightly and takes refuge in the menu. 'What are shallots?'" [
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• Two New YouTube Videos
• Beijing 2008 - Team GB: Diving
Poised on the edge of a 10-metre board towering over a public diving pool in 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 said 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. [
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• Tom Daley: the songs that motivate me
The EaglesPeaceful Easy Feeling
This song means a lot to me because it was the song that my dad used to sing to me when I was going to sleep as a baby. He tells me that every time he hears the song, and he always plays it when we are in the car. I guess it's his favourite song.
He also regularly sings it at karaoke bars, and I have to admit that I too have sung it once, at one of his 'Rob's Still Here' Parties, which is a party he has every year to celebrate that he is still here after he had an operation on a brain tumour. I couldn't really say no at a party like that.
Heather SmallProud
This is one of my favourite songs. It was the theme song for the London 2012 Olympics bid, which makes me think of that amazing moment in July 2005 when it was announced that we'd beaten Paris and would be hosting the Games. And it is also a song that I listen to when I am competing.
It motivates me to work harder during training to try to reach that big ambition of winning an Olympic gold medal - perhaps in London 2012.
R KellyThe World's Greatest
This is another amazing song. It is very good motivational music and I listen to it a lot when I am competing. It makes me want to do well and train harder and make everything as good as it possibly can be with my diving.
It is one of my goals to be the "world's greatest", so when I listen to this song it just makes me more determined to achieve that. I'm sure I will listen to it in Beijing and I hope it will help me do my very best.
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• Daley set to make splash in Games
"Diving is rarely headline news in Britain but Tom Daley is changing all that.
He will be aged just 14 when he competes in Beijing, making him Britain’s second-youngest Olympian of all time.
And while the teenager from Plymouth, south-west England, has repeatedly insisted his main aim in China is to gain experience ahead of the 2012 Games in London, he cannot be ruled out completely as a medal contender.
Even more remarkable than his Olympic qualification at the FINA World Cup in February was his performance a month later in becoming European 10m platform champion in Eindhoven.
Then aged just 13, Daley took on a field that was on average nine years older than he was and included World Cup title holder Sascha Klein." [
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• Tom Daley: Britain's diving wonderboy
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