Olympic Diving: Tom Daley 4/1 For Gold In 10m Platform

Preliminaries: Friday 10th August 7.00pm
Final: Saturday 11th August 8.00pm
Live on TV: BBCi

Cometh the hour, cometh the boy?

18-year-old Thomas Robert Daley enters the Men’s 10 metres platform diving event at his first Olympics with an expectant and heavily patriotic nation behind him, urging him to achieve the greatest accolade available at such a tender age. But Tom is no stranger to immense pressure, expectation or even Olympic competition.

The Great Britain poster boy of this London 2012 Olympic Games got his first taste of Olympic glory more than 5 years ago, as an injured 12-year-old who received special dispensation to compete in the Youth Olympics of Australia 2007.

Not only did Tom compete at such a ridiculously young age, he won the silver medal in the 10 metre Synchronised-diving final!

Since then, his meteoric rise to fame and glory has seen him collect gold medals at both the World and European Championships as well as the Commonwealth games and he quickly became known as the face of the 2012 London Olympics.

However, this fabulous home Olympics didn’t exactly get off to the greatest of starts for Tom as he and partner Peter Waterfield appeared to crumble under pressure after a flawless first few dives in the Men’s Synchronised 10 metre platform final.

They finished fourth, and agonisingly missed out on a medal in their home games by just one place as the fine line between jubilation and commiseration coming to prominence for a devastated Tom and his partner.

That was then, but this is now, and well over a week after his initial upset, Tom has the chance to bury his heartache and claim that elusive first Olympic medal in front of his legions of fans.

Bet365 have opened the book with Tom Daley as second favourite at a price of 4/1 but perhaps more significant is the price of China’s Qiu Bo at 1/3 which clearly underlines just how tough a task Daley faces in beating the imperious Chinese diver.

Qiu is the current World Champion at both the 10 metre platform (where Tom finished 5th) and the 10 metre platform synchro disciplines.

Conclusively, Qiu is clearly the man to beat at the Aquatics centre in the last diving event of the London games, but you can never write off the tenacity and talent that Tom possesses.

The 10 metre platform is by far his strongest and specialist event, with 4 of his 5 World, European and Commonwealth golds coming in this discipline, and if Tom Daley dives to the best of his ability, with the home support behind him every step of the way, he may yet become Great Britain’s Golden boy.