Daley
Vadim Jean (2024)
If you say the words ‘Daley’ and ‘Olympics’ nowadays, most people will think of a diver. The subject of this overdue new documentary, reaching screens just ahead of the Paris Games but more than thirty years after his retirement from competitive athletics, is decathlete Francis Morgan Ayodélé – aka Daley – Thompson. Vadim Jean’s film is shallow and formally unremarkable – an assemblage of news film and talking-head interviews, with Thompson doing a lot of the talking. But it is enjoyable. In contrast to the frustrating Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024), Daley features plentiful coverage of a great champion’s greatest wins – most of them, at any rate. The clips include some actual BBC commentary which, for those of us around at the time, makes them all the more strongly evocative. The exceptional structure and duration of Thompson’s event help, too. Ten components over two days, the points scored for these gradually accumulating, make the decathlon more conducive to dramatic story-telling than any other event in the athletics programme, with the possible exception of the marathon.
Born in Notting Hill in 1958, to a white Scottish mother and a largely absent British-Nigerian father, Daley Thompson first competed in an Olympic decathlon in the Montreal Games of 1976. He was just approaching his eighteenth birthday and he finished eighteenth. The Montreal gold medallist, Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner, recalls in Daley that Thompson was forever asking him questions during the competition. Jenner says he predicted that Thompson would be the Olympic champion in four years’ time. Two years after Montreal, Thompson won gold in the Commonwealth Games, also in Canada (Edmonton) that year. Two weeks later, he won silver in the European Championships in Prague, where he had a relatively poor second day. After that disappointment Thompson didn’t lose again in a major decathlon competition for nine years. He was Olympic champion in 1980 and 1984, World champion in 1983, and European and Commonwealth champion in both 1982 and 1986. He broke the world record four times. His winning run came to an end in 1987, and unsurprisingly: he had missed three months of training due to injury before that year’s World Championships in Rome, where he finished ninth. He was in much better shape for the Seoul Olympics in 1988 until he suffered another injury just before the competition began. He took part nevertheless and, in a close contest for the medals, was still bang in contention when, in the pole vault (the eighth event), his pole snapped and he exacerbated an abductor injury. Thompson battled through the remaining events and missed the bronze medal by just a few points. He was plagued by injuries in subsequent years and announced his retirement in 1992.
Daley Thompson was also, notoriously, a ‘showman’ and a ‘character’. When he was named BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1982, the first words of his acceptance speech were, ‘I feel like shit – I feel terrible …’ After successfully defending his Olympic decathlon title in Los Angeles in 1984, he (a) whistled through the national anthem; (b) wore a T-shirt bearing the words ‘Is the world’s second greatest athlete gay?’, assumed to be a veiled reference to Carl Lewis; (c) chatted with Princess Anne, the President of the British Olympic Association, then made cheeky remarks about HRH in answer to questions at a press conference. Daley includes all these controversial highlights and it’s interesting to experience them again at a distance of forty years. The four-letter word on the live SPOTY broadcast, pretty innocuous now, feels both spontaneous and calculated – that is, it seems to express how Thompson really felt yet he’s determined to let the audience know that. The podium whistling, similarly, comes across as genuinely celebratory but a bit crafty, too.
Some Daley contributors’ comments on Thompson’s disrespectful antics ring false. When Sebastian Coe says the T-shirt must have been ‘hurtful to LGBT communities’ in 1984, he’s making clear he knows that’s the right thing to say in 2024. The veteran sports journalist Colin Hart is more flagrantly two-faced: deploring the T-shirt, he claims that the press, four decades back, didn’t care at all whether Carl Lewis was gay. Yeah, right – especially Hart’s employer, the Sun. Hart is more broadly disingenuous when he describes Thompson’s relationship with the British press, criticising his habitual lack of co-operation and sometimes ‘obnoxious’ behaviour. The bad blood between this particular track and field star and the tabloid press (the adjective needs emphasising) wasn’t unique at the time. Steve Ovett, a much less extrovert character than Daley Thompson, was consistently rubbished by red-top journalists because he didn’t like giving interviews. You sometimes got the impression that Ovett, like Thompson, was tempted into doing things that deliberately annoyed the tabloids. You sympathised with both athletes.
Vadim Jean shows little interest in historical context. He doesn’t tell us that the early and mid-1980s were, for British athletics, an era of exceptionally high international achievement – press and public enjoyed the unusual luxury of having favourites and bugbears among British winners. Brendan Foster’s bronze medal in the 10000m was Britain’s only track and field medal at the 1976 Olympics. It’s true that was the worst British result at any post-war Games but the aggregate total of British athletics medals across the Mexico City (1968), Munich (1972) and Montreal Games was only thirteen, including two gold medals. In the 1980 Olympics alone, the British team won a total of ten medals in track and field, including four golds; in 1984, the medal haul was sixteen, with three golds. Those figures may exaggerate quite how good the British athletes of the time were in world terms – for reasons that Jean also overlooks. More than seventy countries, led by the USA and including the likes of Japan and West Germany, boycotted the Moscow Olympics in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union and other Iron Curtain countries opted for a tit-for-tat boycott of the Los Angeles Games. Even so, most of Britain’s seven Olympic gold medals in athletics in the 1980 and 1984 Games were won by the best in the world at the time, not just the best that turned up on the day.
Lack of background sometimes detracts from Daley not only as a sporting biography but also as a character study. For example, Jean’s coverage of the Moscow Olympics notes the dominance, as a press and TV news story, of the Coe-Ovett rivalry in the 800m and 1500m; by way of evidence, there’s a clip of Kenneth Kendall reading the BBC news headlines on the day that Ovett unexpectedly won the 800m gold with Coe in second place. This is followed by Coe’s recalling how Daley Thompson marched into his room the next morning; Coe, head under the bed sheets, didn’t feel like facing the world. As Thompson thrust back the curtains, Coe asked what the weather was like and got the reply, ‘It all looks a bit silver to me’. The joke was even more cruel than it sounds because Thompson had won his decathlon gold on the same evening that Ovett won the 800m. Jean doesn’t mention this: he wants to make Thompson’s Olympic triumph top of the Moscow bill, regardless of when it happened in relation to the other British results there. The same thing happens in his coverage of Los Angeles, when Thompson’s decathlon win again preceded Coe’s 1500m victory. This time, though, another Coe recollection does convey a strong sense of Thompson’s egocentric competitiveness. After each had successfully defended his Olympic title in Los Angeles, Thompson asked Coe if he’d wanted Thompson to win a second gold. Coe replied that of course he had. He was shocked to learn from Thompson that, ‘I didn’t want you to win again – I wanted to be the only one’.
Thompson’s ethnicity is conspicuous in Daley only to the extent that we see that his main rivals were white. Vadim Jean doesn’t explore what it was like to be Britain’s first non-white sporting superstar. (Before Thompson, John Conteh, world light-heavyweight boxing champion in the mid-1970s, was the closest there’d been to that but Conteh didn’t attain anything like the same level of celebrity.) Jean probably takes his lead on this from Thompson himself who, at an early stage of the film, says that he’s Black but not defined by his Blackness. By the end of Daley, you feel that remark really means that Thompson doesn’t want to discuss race – although he doesn’t steer entirely clear of the subject. Late on, he describes himself as ‘just this little Black kid with no parents’. (The last phrase isn’t literally true, at least as far as Thompson’s mother was concerned: the film gets over well enough his difficult relationship with her.) At the start, we see him standing outside the block of council flats where he spent his early years, in the company of Chris Boyce, his childhood friend. Boyce, who’s also Black, is a very pleasant interviewee but the racial element of Thompson’s story – and how much this may have affected his personality, especially his public personality – remains tantalising. Even so, his unarguable importance as an inspiration to aspiring Black British athletes comes through powerfully in what the likes of Linford Christie, Denise Lewis and Colin Jackson have to say in Daley.
As well as a world-beater on the track and in the field, Daley Thompson was a world-beating psycher-out of his chief opponents. (This too made him – still makes him – an exceptional figure in British sport.) Jürgen Hingsen – runner-up to Thompson in the 1984 Olympics, the 1983 Worlds and the 1982 and 1986 European championships – came to know this better than anyone. Hingsen, a world record-holder who never did win a major championship decathlon, gamely agrees to be interviewed in Daley. In a staged reunion of the two old rivals, both now in their mid-sixties, Daley produces another T-shirt, this one for Jürgen: the words on it tell the wearer and the world there’s no shame in coming second. Even if he’s light-heartedly needling Hingsen to conform to audience expectations, the T-shirt is an illustration of how infuriating Thompson can be on a personal level. He has five children, three with his ex-wife and two with his current partner. Several sequences in Daley show him with his eldest son, Elliot, who tactfully describes him as a better friend than he has been a father. Elliot Thompson, now in his early thirties, became national decathlon champion in 2022 but is well aware he’ll never approach Daley’s standard (his personal best in the event is over 1600 points fewer than his father’s). That doesn’t stop Thompson père from taking every opportunity to mock Thompson fils – humorously and affectionately but always making clear who’s top dog.
Vadim Jean is intent on structuring the Daley Thompson story around his Olympic appearances. It’s mentioned, almost in passing, that Thompson in the mid-1980s is the reigning Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth champion but Jean doesn’t explain that this was an unprecedented achievement. The inaugural World championships in track and field took place in 1983 in Helsinki; Jean omits coverage of the event entirely yet Thompson’s Helsinki victory was doubly important. He became the first-ever British World athletics champion (just twenty-four hours before the second, Steve Cram). This was also his first global title won against the very best opposition in the world. (That hadn’t been the case in Moscow, thanks to the enforced absence of West Germany’s Guido Kratschmer.) I would have liked more from the film too on what Thompson has been doing in the thirty-plus years since he retired from athletics competition. There’s reference to his brief career playing soccer – his first love – in the lower reaches of the football league (and with non-league teams), and to his fling with motorsport, both in the later 1990s. We see him on what is now a weekend routine of coaching other runners, it seems quite informally. We don’t get much idea of what he’s been up to during the intervening decades.
As soon as Colin Hart popped up, I thought: is this the best that Vadim Jean can do for a 1980s track and field journalist? The answer, alas, may well be yes because there aren’t many of them left: Hart, who wrote principally on boxing, is now eighty-nine[1]. (On the other hand, it’s very good to see and hear from Frank Dick in Daley. Thompson’s personal coach, as well as British athletics’ director of coaching throughout the golden years, Dick is still going strong at eighty-three.) Hart and Sebastian Coe, despite telling him off, are agreed that Thompson is Britain’s greatest Olympian. He was certainly the most consistently successful British athlete in an era of unprecedented – and, pace London 2012, still unrepeated – British track and field success. Ron Pickering once exulted, at a crucial point in one of Thompson’s decathlons, ‘Every time – every time he comes good!’ – and he really did. Daley Thompson was a winner and he’s at his most compelling in this documentary when he talks honestly about what it meant to be a winner. Nothing, including family responsibilities, could get in the way of his working hard to win. Nothing has compared since. Playing football and driving a car competitively, says Thompson, were fun – ‘but not being the best guy in the world kind of fun’.
16 July 2024
[1] Afternote: He also featured in a BBC TV documentary about Linford Christie, screened on the eve of the opening ceremony for Paris 2024. Hart’s observations in Linford are even more outrageous than in Daley.