Daley Thompson's constant smile falters as we discuss his role in training
Britain's Olympic hopefuls, or rather his non-role. The double Olympic
gold-winning decathlete's skills have been ignored by the authorities, and
instead he has joined his fellow medallist, Lord Coe, in coaching a young
Australian runner. Despite the rictus grin at his launch as a new commercial
“fitness ambassador”, Thompson appears gutted by his training exclusion from
our sporting picture.
Things looked so different in the 1980s, when Thompson's moustached smile
personified Britain's last great burst of Olympic track and field glory.
Along with Coe, Steve Cram and Steve Ovett, he powered Team GB to the top of
the podium with splendid regularity. But what does someone such as Thompson
do after the cheers have faded to the echo, and especially after he'd spent
his running career needling the authorities?
It helps to have acquired astonishing levels of resilience, the sort that wins
the ultimate discipline of the decathlon, over 100m, 400m, 1500m, 110m
hurdles, high jump, pole vault, long jump, discus, javelin and shot put. In
1984 Thompson was the first athlete for three decades to successfully defend
the Olympic decathlon title, with a performance that's still a UK record. It
would have helped too, though, if he had developed some political
sensibilities, rather than whistling his way through the national anthem on
the Olympic podium, telling the press to piss off, jokingly asking Princess
Anne to have his babies and wearing a T-shirt attacking a rival with the
words: “Is the world's second-greatest athlete gay?” But that's Thompson, a
mix of endearingly jocular enthusiasm and a self-assurance that's not so
much bull-in-china-shop as Pamplona re-routed through a Wedgwood factory.
The reason for today's interview seems a prime example: Thompson is being
unveiled as the ambassador for Nestlé's Go Free scheme, in which you can
swap empty cereal boxes and sweet wrappers for sports-activity vouchers.
Aside from the odd health paradox of encouraging kids to munch sugar in
order to get fit, there's also the open-sore question of Nestlé's long
opposed practice of pushing baby-milk powder at mothers in developing
nations. But more of that later.
We meet at a flash new sports club down the road from Thompson's home in
Chiswick, West London. He looks a poster boy for 50-year-old health. “I go
training most days. I don't train particularly hard. I do circuits, lift
weights, go on a bike or jog,” he says. It sounds like quite a regimen to
me.
What's his motivation? He looks blank (introspection and journalists are
clearly not his favourite things), then brightens. “My goal is to be able to
run around with my kids,” he says. “As I've got one who's 22 months old, I
would like to still be able to run about with him when he's 20 and I will
be... oh my God,” he laughs one of his big, loud laughs.
After his sporting career ended, family life occupied much of Thompson's newly
emptied hours. He had three children in his first marriage. Now, with his
girlfriend Lisa, he has two more young ones. “I was in the doldrums for a
while after my athletics career ended,” he admits. “You spend six to eight
hours a day training twice a day for 18 years. I was taken up having a
family and that kind of stuff. When you stop, you've got to find something
worthwhile to do.”
In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, one might expect him to be doing
worthwhile work honing Britain's next generation of athletes. But Thompson
has been airbrushed from the scene, to the point where he is markedly absent
from Camelot's new list of the six greatest British Olympians whose faces
will grace its fundraising lottery scratchcards for 2012. In his place are
the likes of Duncan Goodhew: a great swimmer, but with only one gold to his
tally. It probably didn't help that Thompson publicly decried national
lottery funding of athletes as encouraging mediocrity.
Instead, his talents are boosting our rivals. “I am helping people to train,
but not from a governing body point of view. I'm doing it off my own back,”
he says. “I'm helping a girl, an Australian 800m runner who's going to
Beijing. I do it with Seb Coe. He does the running bit and I do the rest of
the stuff. No one British has asked me for help,” he shrugs.
“It's not just me; Seb Coe, Steve Cram, Roger Black - we are all happy to help
if asked. It's down to the British athletics regime: as an achiever, you
tend to make those people look not so good. Which is OK, it's no big deal,”
he says, in the way that only clearly miffed people say, “It's OK, it's no
big deal.” Then he adds: “The country's most under-utilised resource must be
our experience. We've got some great blokes out there who are not being
used.”
So what does he have to offer young athletes? “Head stuff,” he says. “Some
people are not as confident as they could be, despite the fact that they
train every day. So I can help with getting things in perspective. It's
different for everybody. It goes from having no confidence to being way too
confident. I've never needed to study sports psychology. The great thing
about doing sport is that it teaches you crucial lessons, the good and bad
things about yourself. And you learn to spot it in others. If you spend five
minutes with people, you learn how they work under pressure.” “How am I
doing?” I ask. “Pretty good,” he giggles. “But your shorthand's not quite
fast enough.”
Thompson knows from deep experience how that “head stuff” can make the
difference, particularly in psyching out opponents. “At the Olympics there's
a post-warm-up procedure: you go into a cool room where everyone sits
together for 25 minutes. It can easily be where people win or lose the race.
I did not deliberately try to upset anyone in there; I was always just my
usually happy self. It was not a practical ploy.” Nevertheless, the presence
of ever-smiling Daley could prove unsettling. “The Olympics is like two
weeks at boarding school. You may be sitting having breakfast eyeball to
eyeball with the bloke who is your biggest rival. I know gold medallists who
can't stand the nerves of it. They always got upset stomachs.”
Away from the heat of Olympic competition though, that winner's thick skin can
prove a weakness. His involvement with Nestlé surely won't assist his
rehabilitation with the British Olympic regime. Doesn't he fear being
vilified by protesters such as the Baby Milk Action Group? “That's a good
question,” he says, looking rather uninterested. “I don't know anything
about that.” Well. So I explain how a broad alliance of global groups has
spent the past decade publicly protesting at Nestlé's marketing of baby-milk
formula in developing countries, flouting a World Health Organisation ban on
the practice. “It sounds like her department,” says Thompson, glancing to
the Nestlé PR woman sitting at his elbow.
She explains that the baby-milk arm of Nestlé is a “separate corporate entity”
from the food part of Nestlé (including Rowntree's sweets, Nesquik and
Golden Nuggets), which runs the sports awards, so that people really
shouldn't mix up issues affecting the two. During this exchange, Thompson
nervously scoffs a complimentary tube of Fruit Pastilles. “Well, I'm with
Rowntree's anyway,” he laughs.
“The kids are the place to start for 2012”
Thompson's doing plenty of admirable work elsewhere, such as helping
Barnardo's to recruit charity volunteers. “Yeah, they needed someone to
front up their London Marathon effort,” he says. “They asked me about five
to ten years ago to help to run training sessions and it's gone on from
there. I also do Sport For Good with a bunch of other old sportspeople such
as Bobby Charlton, Pele, Ian Botham and Seb Coe. It tries to use sport to
achieve social change. We have a programme with Manchester United, where we
encourage teenagers to come and play football, but also to talk about their
problems. There's a huge amount of youth depression about.”
The charity also runs celebrity-coached midnight basketball games in several
US cities. “Eighty per cent of the drugs crime occurs between 10pm and 4am,
so that's when we run the basketball project. If you want an hour's
coaching, you also have to do an hour's worth of literacy or sex education.”
Thompson is genuinely engaged and enthusiastic about this work, far beyond
the celeb cliché of “giving something back”. Nevertheless, he's convinced
that he was lucky to enter athletics when he did, unlike today's young
up-and-comings. “I was fortunate that when I started it was practically
amateur, but when I was getting established it was more professional, so you
could earn a living out of it. I was able to stand on the shoulders of
giants. Coe, Ovett and Cram brought the whole spotlight on to athletics in
the 1980s. It was the biggest sport we had. I never thought about a
long-term plan. I have had a charmed life.”
What's next in this charmed life? “I'm going to the Beijing Olympics. As to
how well we will do...well, probably OK,” he says by way of witheringly
faint praise. “I see Beijing as a dress rehearsal for London. I'm hoping
that our kids will learn some good lessons for 2012. I'm involved with
schools in trying to build up some momentum for the London Olympics. The
kids are the place to start and 2012 should be able to influence the health
of the nation.”
Has he never thought of developing some political skills like his old mucker,
Lord Coe? He recoils in his chair. “Nah. It's way too much trouble,
politics. People phoning you up all the time because someone's broken their
gate or something. It's definitely not my thing.” Instead he is committed to
keeping working away, trying to maintain that constant Daley smile. “I don't
like being serious. The world is a serious place,” he says. “Part of the
thing about sport, because of so-called progress, is that hardly any of the
kids in it seem to be having a good time. That's no advert, and we need to
change it.”
