Team GB confirmed on Tuesday that Tom Daley will compete at his fifth Olympics in Paris this summer – a record for British diving. He will be paired with Noah Williams in men’s 10m synchro. Britain’s seven other synchro divers were also named on Tuesday. Find out who else made the team, and what Daley had to say.
Team GB named at least half of its Olympic diving team on Tuesday by confirming all four of its synchro pairings.
Tom Daley will lead the team in experience. The soon-to-be-30-year-old will compete in men’s 10m synchro with Noah Williams, his fifth synchro partner in five Games. In Tokyo 2020, Daley won gold with Matty Lee. In Rio 2016, he took bronze with Daniel Goodfellow. But Daley’s Olympic career dates all the way back to 2008, in Beijing, shortly after his 14th birthday. Four Olympic medals later (including two in the individual 10m events), the father-of-two stopped diving after Tokyo. He only announced his comeback on July 29, 2023.
“It’s not even been a year that I’ve been back to training,” Daley said on Tuesday. “I think that’s an achievement in itself,” adding that “this time is very different. It feels like a bonus year.”
When Daley announced his comeback on social media, he traced the decision to the day he took his elder son, Robbie, to visit the Olympic Museum and Robbie told him, “Papa, I want to see you dive at the Olympics.”
“It started off as one of those silly ideas,” Daley admitted in February. “Now the thing is staying healthy and getting to the start line. That’s always the hardest thing about the Olympics: arriving in one piece and feeling mentally fresh and healthy.”
Interestingly, Daley and his Paris synchro partner train on separate continents. Daley has been preparing at the University of California in Los Angeles, and Williams trains in London, but they plan to convene in UCLA in June and in the UK in July.
Although they are a relatively new synchro team, Daley and Williams already claimed the silver medal in men’s 10m synchro at the 2024 World Aquatics Championships, in Doha, Qatar, this past February.
Team GB will also be a medal threat in the men’s 3m synchro event where Jack Laugher, the 2016 Olympic gold medallist, with partner with Olympic rookie Anthony Harding, 23. They were the silver medalists at the 2022 World Aquatics Championships in Budapest, Hungary and placed fourth at the 2023 World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan.
Headlining the women’s team will be 19-year-old Andrea Spendolini Sirieix who will return for her second Olympics and contest women’s 10m synchro with three-time Olympian Lois Toulson, 24. Together, they took silver at the 2023 World Aquatics Championships and, more recently, the bronze at the 2024 world championships.
In women’s 3m synchro, Great Britain will enter the Olympic veteran Scarlett Mew Jensen, 22, and Olympic debutante Yasmin Harper, 23. The pair claimed two world championship medals together, a silver in 2023, and bronze in 2024.
Some of the Team GB synchro divers will compete in individual events as well. Daley, however, won’t be among them.
“The individual [event] ship has sailed for me,” Daley told World Aquatics on Tuesday. “ Coming back and qualifying in synchro was a steep enough ask. If I’d come back earlier, maybe I could have gotten something together for individual…but I’m enjoying myself just doing synchro. It’s reduced my load in training. I’ve been able to have much better work-life balance.”
The rest of the British diving team will be confirmed after the Speedo Aquatics GB Diving Championships May 23-26, at the Sandwell Aquatics Centre (four miles west of Birmingham, England), which was the diving venue for the 2022 Commonwealth Games.