DALEY Is the long-awaited autobiography of the life of double Olympic decathlon champion, Daley Thompson. Wearing his heart on his sleeve, he chronicles his legendary sporting achievements, but, for the first time, also reveals the personal struggles he faced to rise from the humblest of beginnings to become the ultimate Olympic Superstar, who then had to reconcile what he had become with his own humanity as a son and as a father. At his sporting peak, Daley was a charismatic, uncompromising, anti-establishment superhero. That was the public persona the nation loved, and which inspired a generation of Britons to realise that a young Black man could be our hero. But the introvert Daley didn’t want to be ‘famous’ for anything other than his sporting achievements. He was, and remains, the antithesis of today’s social media obsessed ‘celebrity’. For him, the pure Olympian, it was only ever about the sport and the winning. Much as Daley may be cast as ‘unrelenting, invincible for ten years’, his sporting supremacy was a product of his singular willpower and courage. He is an invention of his own making, inherently human and born of an Olympian ideal that we all admire, yet with all the same flaws and frailties as the rest of us. Now, for the first time, he tells his story, no punches pulled.
