He finished 18th! Four years later at the Moscow Olympics, he won the gold medal, finishing points ahead of his nearest rival. Till Thompson arrived on the scene, the decathlon was one of the least popular spectator events in athletics. Thompson changed all that with his colour and flamboyance. He made each element of the decathlon a drama in itself. He was a superb athlete, one who had dedicated his life to nothing but getting better and better in the event. The number of world-class decathletes shot up during the 'Daley decade'.
A score of points was bettered over times in the 's! He was driven forward by competition from the likes of German Jurgen Hingsen, with the pair breaking the world record five times between them in the Los Angeles cycle. Thompson did it when it mattered - and became the second man after Bob Mathias to win two Olympic decathlon gold medals in Recurring hamstring issues imposed retirement on Thompson and you sense he would have continued to further Games had his body not intervened.
Thompson lives alone in Hove, Sussex and has five children. Pick 2. It's intrusive. It's not for me. But I wouldn't change my life at all. I wouldn't change a day. Athletics, I suggest to Thompson, is uninteresting to many because of the slender margins between victory and defeat. The decathlon is different because — rather like cricket where, even at the highest level, bowlers who can't bat are obliged to — you have the spectacle of supremely gifted performers attempting things they're not especially good at, which is always fascinating.
Thompson says he was fortunate his best events came first. Day one opens with the metres. Then long jump, putting the shot, high jump and the metres.
The decathlon requires a wide range of skills. Come to think of it, the decathlon might be even more popular if we widened the range even further. Start day one with juggling, say, followed by bowls and origami It's not enough for him to win; he has to Thompson might have had a third Olympic gold, had injury not hampered him in There's a widely held assumption based on his athletic achievements, I suggest, that he must have been taking performance-enhancing drugs; people might no more believe a s track and field champion who says he didn't take drugs than a s rock drummer who claims he never smoked cannabis.
I believe anybody who's taking drugs knowingly shouldn't be allowed back. He could be very sarcastic; very full of himself. He was mean as shit with money. But I've never heard any suggestion he took drugs.
He's remained close to Sebastian Coe, who is vehemently opposed to drug use. I don't believe they could have stayed so close if he'd been taking anything. The only thing Daley Thompson ever got high on was himself. His mother, Lydia, came from Dundee; his father, a Nigerian who ran a minicab firm, left home when Daley [a contraction of Ayodele, an African name meaning "joy comes home"] was six. A year later, the boy, described by his mother as "a terror from the start", was sent on a council grant to Farley Close, a Sussex boarding school he calls "a place for troubled children".
Daley's brother and sister attended state schools. As soon as the bullet hit him. He was shot. In Streatham. Him and a mate were dropping off some woman.
Her husband shot my dad. As a very young boy, he'd wanted to be a footballer, but was instinctively drawn to arenas celebrating individual, rather than collective, achievement. He trained as a sprinter with clubs including Essex Beagles, where he met his first serious coach, Bob Mortimer.
His first decathlon was in Cwmbran, Wales, in I'd never done six of the events before. But in Wales, at the end of the first day, I was thinking, I could be the best at this. It was all Bob's idea. My great strength is that I'm lucky. Things fall into place for me. He was still in his teens when his mother announced he could either get a job, or move out. Thompson went to lodge with Doreen Rayment, a woman he calls auntie.
On one side the athletes and media he'd snubbed, who lost no opportunity to get back at him. Far more dangerous was an inner circle of people in whose eyes Thompson could do no wrong. Every one of Daley's jokes was hilarious; every criticism unfounded. Thompson concedes that, "I probably was occasionally a bit of a knob. Who isn't, when they're 21? Then perform, three days later? I'm not a tourist.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who approach me and say, 'What was on your shirt again? Show you have personality. Most Olympic athletes, people don't have feelings about. This last remark illustrates the two conflicting impulses that have shaped Thompson's somewhat complex relationship with the world: a desperate need to be noticed, and an even more powerful desire to be left alone.
Where this second requirement is concerned, his luck has sometimes deserted him.
0コメント