Doing a choreographed dive into a pool from 10 meters above would scare most people. But for Tom Daley, who won five Olympic medals doing just that, it’s his job at home that frightens him the most. “Everything scares me about parenthood because [your kids are] all you think about,” he tells Yahoo Life.
The 31-year-old former British diver and his husband, Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, are fathers to two boys: Robert “Robbie” Ray, who turns 7 this month, and Phoenix Rose, 2. Now that Daley has left Olympic diving behind, announcing his retirement after the 2024 Summer Games, he’s trying to navigate what it means to parent in this new chapter of his life.
“For me, being a dad is all about being present, being there to play, being there to love, being able to be completely emotionally available,” he says. “To be there to pick your kids back up when they fall, and to encourage and support them and make them feel like they’re invincible and protecting that feeling for as long as possible before the world tells ’em otherwise.”
Being more present, post-retirement
While Daley is no longer competing on the Olympic stage, he hasn’t retired retired. He continues to be a media personality — this month releasing the documentary 1.6 Seconds, which follows his sports achievements and powerful backstory, including the death of his own dad — and is otherwise focused on his knitting brand, Made With Love by Tom Daley. Husband Black, meanwhile, is an American screenwriter, director and producer. Both have work and travel schedules that Daley says can be tricky to juggle alongside the demands of parenting.
“That guilt as a working parent when you have to travel is a lot,” he says. “One of us always has to stay behind, obviously, to be able to be there with the kids, or the kids come with us. … It’s this dance that becomes really quite a challenge.”
But there’s more flexibility compared to when Daley was diving. “That was so structured and [there was] so much routine and so many goals and [it was] very one thing to the next,” he says. “There would be occasions where I’d miss the wake-up with the boys or I would see ’em just before I would leave for training. Whereas now I’m around a lot more.”
He does still travel for work, including making trips back from the family’s home in Los Angeles to his native U.K. “I do have to leave occasionally, but when I’m there, I’m there,” Daley says. “And I think that’s the real difference, is that I can be really present and really engaged in everything that they’re doing. I can go running around on the weekends with them without worrying about being too exhausted for training the next day.”
Robbie, for one, understood his dad’s job as a diver and even looked forward to Daley (known at home as “Papa”) taking trips for it. “I would always bring him back a Lego,” says Daley. As for Black’s job as a filmmaker, the boys don’t have a grasp on what that means quite yet.
“I think the kids really like to see us happy, and they like to see us doing the thing that we love to do because that’s what they hope to do when they’re older. They want to be able to do something that they love to do,” says Daley, noting that he won’t put pressure on either of them to go into sports. “If they want to, great. … I’m very much happy to let them try as many things as they want to show interest in, and then we see what happens from there.”
‘What is a normal family right now?’
As an LGBTQ couple who welcomed their boys through the surrogacy process, Daley and Black might be thought of as an archetype of the “modern family.” But as Daley points out, there’s no real ideal for family dynamics in 2025.
“What is a normal family right now, and what is the best dynamic of a family? I think as long as the child is loved and cared for, that’s the most important,” says Daley. “In order for LGBT people to have a family, it takes a lot of planning. So every child is so extremely loved, wanted, cared for.”
He’s a believer that parenting “takes a village” and values their surrogate’s role in that as well. “We had the most magical experience. Our surrogate, who doesn’t want us naming her, has become a dear friend, [as well as] her husband and her kids. [She] is someone that was so selfless to be able to help us have our dream family.”
Despite the chaos that fills a home with two young children, Daley says he finds the most joy in “the moments where they just come over to you and give you a hug, unsolicited, and they just want to sit with you and be with you ’cause you are their person. I think that for me is the most magical thing.”
And it’s not lost on Daley that he was only 7 when he started diving. “Robbie’s getting to those ages where I was starting to do those things,” notes Daley, who credits his late father for allowing him to chase that dream. “It’s very surreal to think.”
