The famous British athlete Daley Thompson is undoubtedly one of the greatest decathletes of all time. He is the only athlete to win back-to-back Olympic golds and a World Championship in the decathlon. He also created four world records, won three Commonwealth gold medals and two European Championships. He easily surpassed the feats of all decathletes before him.
Daley began competing in the decathlon in 1975 and won every event he entered from 1978 until 1988. His gold medals at the Olympic Games were won in Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 editions. Throughout the 1980s, he won 19 decathlons and always thrilled the crowds with his competitive ability.
In 1983, Daley won the inaugural World Championships and became the first decathlete to hold a continental title, and the World and Olympic titles simultaneously. He also became by virtue of his World title, the first athlete in any athletics event to hold Olympic, World, continental and Commonwealth Games titles in a single event simultaneously.
“Decathlon” means ten events in Greek, and a form of it was a part of competition in the ancient Greek Olympics. The modern version has been around since the turn of the twentieth century. It is a series of ten events and any athlete who participates must be of all round talent.
The first day events include 100m, long jump, shot put, high jump and 400m. On the second day the athlete take part in the 110m hurdles, discus throw, pole vault, javelin throw and 1500m. Anyone who misses one event is out of the whole competition. Each athlete earns points according to a system devised by the IAAF. For each competition, an athlete can earn up to 1,200 points.
Birth and Determined Career
Daley was born as Francis Ayodele Thompson in Notting Hill, London on July 30, 1958. He is the second son of a British Nigerian father, Frank Thompson, who ran a minicab firm, and Scottish mother, Lydia, from Dundee. His father gave him the African name Ayodele, but this was later shortened to Dele, and then to Daley, the name the world would come to know him.
Even in childhood, he wanted to win. Cordner Nelson wrote in Track’s Greatest Champions that Daley said, “I just had to be first at everything, from catching the bus to finishing my lunch.” And his brother agreed, “Sport was life and death to Daley.”
When Daley was six, his father left home. At seven, Lydia sent Daley to Farley Close Boarding School in Sussex. His mother did not particularly encourage his interest in sports, but at the school, he grew up in a disciplined environment where skill in sports was highly valued. At first, he liked soccer, but eventually turned to athletics.
At 14, Daley competed in his first open meet. In 1975, he won the national junior indoor 60m and thought of himself as a sprinter. His coach, Bob Mortimer was instrumental in introducing him for decathlon. Initially, he was a member of Haywards Heath Harriers, but later joined the Newham and Essex Beagles Athletics club.
Daley said, “In the decathlon, nothing is won ahead of time. You can have one good event, but you’ll never know how the next one turns out until you get to it.” Although his performance was uneven, at age 16, he had won an incredible total of 6685 points in the combined events, which was only 140 points less than Bob Mathias had when he won the 1948 Olympics. Thompson realized he had talent for the decathlon and that he loved it - he was hooked.
Daley loved the points system of the decathlon and said, “I can go into a competition in the long jump, say, and it is only a fraction above a training session in my mind, regardless of how big a meet it is. But put me in a competition where I’m getting some points at the end of it, and I’m a different man.”
Montreal 1976 Olympic Games
In 1976, he won the AAA title. At 18, he participated in his first Olympics at Montreal, and came in eighteenth. “I couldn’t get enough of it,” he told.“It was a learning experience I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. I was in total awe of almost all the others there in the decathlon.” The awe went both ways: the gold medalist and world record holder in the event, Bruce Jenner, was impressed with Thompson’s performance and predicted that one day, he would win the event and become the Olympic champion.
In 1977, he won the European Junior title and in 1978 won his first Commonwealth Games gold in Edmonton, Canada. In 1979, he won the long jump at the UK Championships. Then, he was training about eight hours a day, and had little time for anything else in life, but this did not bother him. He told, “It’s my life. There isn’t anything I want to do more than decathlon.”
In 1979, a television audience of several million viewers saw him winning the gold medal in the British Commonwealth Games. After this victory, he was offered training space at San Diego State University, where he trained for seven months in 1979 and 1980.
Moscow 1980 Olympic Games
Daley opened the Olympic season with a world decathlon record of 8,622 points at Gotzis, Austria, on May 18, 1980.His fierce competitive drive and irreverent attitude, won him at just 21, his first Olympic title at the Moscow 1980 Olympic Games.
After a quiet 1981 season, he was in top form in 1982; back at Gotzis on May 23, 1982, he raised the world record to 8,704 points and then on September 8, 1980, at the European Championships in Athens, he took the record up to 8,743 points.
The following month in Brisbane, Daley won his second Commonwealth Games gold. He spent much of the summer of 1984 in California preparing for the defense of his Olympic title.
Los Angeles 1984 Olympic Games
Daley’s two victories in the Olympic decathlon are a feat shared only with the Americans Bob Mathias and Ashton Eaton. His 1984 performance is still the UK record. Daley took the lead in the first event, a lead he never relinquished throughout the competition.
For the first seven events, little separated Daley and the world record holder, Jurgen Hingsen of West Germany, as they battled for the gold. But Daley pulled away with strong performances in the pole vault and the javelin. With the gold medal secure, Daley needed to run the final event, the 1500m, in 4:34.98 to break Hingsen’s world record. Yet, he eased up at the finish line and stopped the clock at 4:35.00.
However, when the photo-finish pictures were examined, it was found that Daley should have been credited with one more point in the 110m hurdles so he had in fact, equaled Hingsen’s record of 8798 points on August 9, 1984. Then when the new scoring tables were introduced, Daley became the sole record holder once more with a recalculated score of 8,847 points – a world record that stood until 1992, when it was surpassed by the American athlete Dan O’Brien with a score of 8,891.
At that Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, the extra training paid off, however, and Thompson did win the gold. He was stopped only by the weather, which worked against him. He did set a new Olympic record, with a point total of 8,798, which stood until 1996.
Daley told,“Every successive morning you wake up with some kind of residual tiredness in you. If you start day A at 100%, maybe at day Z you’re feeling only 40%, yet you have to train harder. The tiredness just gets worse and worse because there really aren’t enough hours in the day to do enough. I would like to be able to do more. At least once or twice in every session I try to do an event very well so that even on my worse days I can throw a certain distance or jump a certain height.”
Two years later, IAAF reviewed the photo timer results and discovered that Daley had completed the 110m hurdles one hundredth of a second quicker than initially recorded. They added one more point to his Olympic total and he was given a belated share of the world record. This record would stand until it was bettered by Roman Sebrle of the Czech Republic at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games.
Daley won his third Commonwealth Games gold in 1986 in Edinburgh along with a silver in 4x100m relay. Since then, he could not recapture his superlative form of earlier years.
In 1987, he suffered his first decathlon defeat for nine years when he finished ninth in the World Championships. Also, at his fourth Olympics in Seoul 1988, he missed a medal, finishing fourth.
Thompson’s rivalry with West German athlete Jurgen Hingsen was legendary in the sport throughout the 1980s. The pair constantly traded world records, but Daley always had the upper hand in the major competitions, remaining undefeated for nine years between 1978 and 1987.
Commitment, Greatness and Passion
In 1988, Daley’s hope of winning three Olympic gold medals shattered as his pole-vault broke in half, re-injuring his adductor muscle, which he had already hurt in 1983. It was the end of his Olympic hopes, but not the end of his career as a sportsman. He continued to work in sports, training other athletes.
Since he wanted to be a great athlete, Daley knew that he would have to do all right in school, if only just to have the freedom to train. In Black Sportsmen, Ernest Cashmore wrote that Daley said, “My teachers were all right about my sport; they left me alone and left me to do what I wanted to do, which suited me. They never bothered me in regard to sport or academically. I knew that, if I did the work, they couldn’t say anything to me, so I did the minimum.”
Daley went to college, studying physics, biology, and geography at Crawley College of Technology, not because he was particularly interested in studying, but because he knew that going to college would give him time and space to train.
Daley had an unusual attitude toward his race. When Ernest Cashmore told Thompson he wanted to interview him, he was initially puzzled. “I don’t know what you want to talk to me for,” he said. “I’m not black.”
Cashmore speculated that Daley’s lack of consciousness about his race stemmed from his growing up in an insulated environment at boarding school. Daley told Cashmore, “Even though all the other kids at school were white, I never sensed I was different at all. I never even thought about my skin color. I suppose I was protected from many kinds of the pressures on black kids because of my schooling. Having mixed parents probably had a lot to do with it as well, even though I never had a lot of contact with either of them.”
Cashmore asked Daley what he would do if he and a white man had the same qualifications and applied for the same job, and the white man got it. Daley said he would “go away, think about why this had happened, and apply again.” If it happened three more times he would “get a degree and apply again, with superior qualifications.” Cashmore noted that Daley’s way of dealing with racism is simply to refuse to recognize it; “He refuses to believe or admit that there is any possibility of failure for any reason - even if the reason is other people’s attitudes.”
Unlike many other athletes, Daley did not have any mentors or idols. He told Cashmore, “I had no influences on my career; no idols or friends who were in athletics and I didn’t see my coach that much. I just worked at it myself. I feel no obligation to anyone at all. It’s not as if I’m in a sport where I have to sell tickets. I don’t depend on people.”
Daley has always been friendly but inwardly shy, according to those who know him. Thompson told Nelson, “People have gotten the idea that I’m an outgoing guy, an extrovert. I’m not, but people expect me to live up to my image. When there are lots of people around, they expect me to be loud, jovial, silly, making pranks all the time.”
Retirement, Awards and Achievements
Daley was a natural showman. But behind the cheeky grin was a will of iron and was the undisputed champion of decathlon between 1979 and 1987, remaining undefeated. Daley was forced to retire from athletics in 1992, due to a persistent hamstring injury. He is a father of five children.
Daley was also well known for his appearances in commercials for the drink Lucozade in the 1980s. His name was used for three officially licensed home computer games by Ocean Software in the 1980s. He is also a brand ambassador for a travel agency network “Not Just Travel.”
He won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award in 1982, and was appointed an MBE in the 1983, and promoted to the CBE in the 2000 New Year Honours. In the 1990s, he briefly played reserve team football for Mansfield Town and played one first-team game for non-League side Stevenage F.C. before having a short spell at non-League side Ilkeston F.C.
He also worked as fitness coach for Wimbledon and Luton Town football clubs. He also took part in motor sport, entering the Ford Credit Fiesta Challenge Championship in 1994. Daley continued as a fitness trainer and motivational speaker, as well as appearing at corporate events. In 1994, he trained with Reading Football Club and even scored in a friendly against Leatherhead.
In 2002, Daley’s successful defense of his Olympic title was ranked number 34 on Channel 4’s poll of the 100 Greatest Sporting Moments. He was an ambassador for the London 2012 Olympics, focusing during the bid stage on highlighting the benefits that hosting the Olympics would bring to education and sport in schools. He also took part in the 2011 TV series Jamie’s Dream School.
In 2015, he opened his own gym, Daley Fitness, located on Upper Richmond Road in London. Besides, he co-presented the mid-morning show on talkSPORT once a week alongside Colin Murray. In 2018, he joined Masterchef Gary Barnshaw and co-founded DT10 Sports, creating and selling a range of low-sugar protein shakes and sports bars.
(The author is the winner of Presidential Awards for Sports and recipient of multiple National Accolades for Academic pursuits. He possesses a PhD, MPhil and double MSc. He can be reached at [email protected])