ARTICLE AD BOX
1.6 seconds – the title of a new Discovery+ documentary about a British diving sensation – is the time it takes for a human body to plunge from the 10m board into a swimming pool. The art of the controlled descent – falling with style, in Buzz Lightyear terms – captures the public imagination every four years, when the Olympics roll around, turning these athletes, briefly, into stars. From the tabloid sensation of Greg Louganis to the medal machine Wu Minxia, it is a precision-engineered discipline that requires personality as well as competence. Enter, then, Tom Daley.
1.6 Seconds tells the story of Daley’s two decades in competitive platform diving. From the tiny 10-year-old tumbling into the Plymouth pool to his valedictory bronze at last year’s Paris games, via Olympics in Beijing, London, Rio and Tokyo, it is a story of precocious brilliance and the price paid for that early success. “I’ve never had any kind of media training,” Daley reveals, as he sits serenely, commenting on home video footage playing on a big screen. “Other than the fact I’ve had a camera following me around since I was 9 or 10 years old.” Those videos, which the team here have revelatory access to, were shot largely by Daley’s father, Rob, a huge figure in his development, who passed away shortly after the Beijing Olympics. This forms the film’s first chapter: Daley, a premature grandee at 31, looking back on Daley, a premature virtuoso, at 10.
It’s a shame that the film isn’t more interested in being a psychological study as the narrative progresses. Five Olympic Games is a lot to fit into an hour and a half, so the structure is straitjacketed by this linearity. We skip from one games to another, pausing only briefly to consider the big life events: bullying at school post-Beijing, the death of his father, coming out as a gay, meeting his husband, and the birth of his children. Introspection on tabloid intrusion (“I look back on it now,” Daley reveals, of paparazzi at his father’s funeral, “and it just feels really abusive”) is rapidly sidelined in favour of the dogged beat-hitting of Daley’s sporting journey. Perhaps this is natural: 1.6 Seconds is a co-production of Warner Bros Discovery, which holds the international broadcast rights to the Olympics, and the Olympics Channel itself. This is a sports documentary, not a documentary about coming of age as a teenage boy.
Yet that elides something essential to the Daley story. Compared to the average Joe (compared to me) he is a remarkable athlete, but compared to other Olympians, his record doesn’t stand out. Three of his five medals were in synchro, yet his partners (Daniel Goodfellow, Matty Lee, and Noah Williams) are barely name-checked. What makes Daley exceptional has always been his public perception: the charismatic wunderkind turned LGBT icon. That has not always been a smooth process. Criticism has been levelled at the 20-year age gap with his husband Dustin Lance Black (who describes, here, coming up with the names of their children on their first date, when Daley had just turned 19 and Black was 38), or their use of surrogates for the births of their children, Robbie and Phoenix. All of this would’ve introduced more friction – more interest – rather than a romp that feels like cascading down a Wikipedia page.
Perhaps this is a function of Daley serving as executive producer on the film. He is a very measured, deliberate presence; someone who has played the delicate media game since before puberty. Black refers to diving as “a sport where [Daley] could practice his perfectionism”, and that desire for control shines through. Both Daley and Black sound scripted, not even allowing the emotion of more intimate moments to creep in. It makes it serviceable as a retelling, but feels like a missed opportunity, with access to unseen footage and major contributors to Daley’s life like coaches Andy Banks and Jane Figueiredo, to get beneath the surface. “I’m a writer, I could make up happy endings,” Black declares of Daley’s gold in Tokyo. “And he had just written the most glorious third act.” If that sounds a little overripe, that’s because it is.
In diving, it is good to make no splash. The same is not true of TV. For all the pleasure viewers will get from reliving the highs (that first medal in London) and lows (crashing out in the Rio semis), 1.6 Seconds fails to answer the core question. Why Tom Daley? Why has this unassuming Devonian become the international face of British athletics? That’s a question that transcends sport; one that, had they tried to answer it, might have painted a fuller, more complex, less hagiographic portrait.
English (US) ·