Why Paris 2024 is turning into the ‘Dadlympics’

The sight of fathers – teary Tom Daley and Adam Peaty on the podiums, Mick Jagger and Fred ‘First Dates’ Sirieix watching with the children in the stands – all getting emotional has been an unexpected highlight of these Games, says Jim White

‘I love you, Daddy’: Adam Peaty hugs his son George after winning silver in the men’s 100 metres breaststroke (Getty)

When Tom Daley spoke after securing his fifth Olympic medal on Monday, the seasoned diver was clearly emotional. In Paris, the waterworks were in full operation. He may have won gold in Tokyo but he reckoned the silver he and his dive partner Noah Williams achieved in the 10-metre synchronised competition was the most significant of his stellar career. For the simple reason, he had achieved it in front of his two sons, Robbie and Phoenix.

“It felt like we had won just being there with my family and my kids,” said Daley. “Just before the competition started, I saw them in the audience and thought: ‘Don’t cry now.’ That was the achievement and, at that moment, I was: ‘No matter what happens, I’ve done it.’ I was on the sofa 15 months ago doing nothing. It is the happiest I’ve ever been diving. It was so special.”

Indeed, Daley credited Robbie, his six-year-old, for getting him back into competition in the first place. After he had won in Tokyo, he had not dived into water in more than 18 months. He preferred, he said, to concentrate on his knitting, supporting his husband, film screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, at their home in Los Angeles.

Robbie, though, had apparently spotted his old man deep in his Bavarian twisted stitches and thought: wasn’t this fellow once an athlete? So he persuaded his dad to have one last go at a medal in Paris. “Do it for me,” the lad had apparently said.

Having lost his own father, who had supported him throughout his meteoric rise, Daley was particularly prone to junior pressure. Hence his emotional response: frankly, he would not have been in Paris at all were it not for his lad’s persuasive abilities.

And Daley has not been the only one marking the special bond between father and participant at these Games. Fred Sirieix, best known as the maitre d’ appearing on Channel 4’s First Dates, was spotted blubbing in the stands as his daughter Team GB’s Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix and her partner took bronze in the women’s synchronised 10m platform.

Adam Peaty reckoned it was the words of his three-year-old son George after he had failed by the slimmest of margins to win three gold medals in successive games that provided him with the most wholesome of consolation.

“I love you, Daddy,” the boy had said. At which Peaty lost his cool completely, blubbing openly until, he said, his face “was swollen after crying so much”.

Meanwhile, the British rower Lola Anderson revealed that her single most substantial motivational tool was a note she had written in her diary when she was a 12-year-old watching the London 2012 Games. Or rather, what happened to it subsequently.

“My name is Lola Anderson,” it read. “And I think it would be my biggest dream in life to go to the Olympics in rowing and if possible win a gold for GB.”

Embarrassed at her presumption, she tore the page out, threw it in the bin and forgot about it.

Seven years later, her father Don, who was in the latter stages of a battle with terminal cancer, handed the note back to her. He had found it while taking out the rubbish, had stored it away and kept it the whole time. Now on his death bed, he wanted her to have it back. And the note was in her pocket when she won gold in the women’s quadruple sculls final.

Dads and their offspring have been a sizeable part of the Olympic story ever since the 1992 Games in Barcelona. When the runner Derek Redmond tore a hamstring during his 400m race, he limped on towards the finish line. His dad Jim, watching from the stands, could not bear to see him in pain, so forced his way onto the track to help the lad. “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “Yes, I do,” said the runner. “In which case,” answered his dad, “we do it together.”

And they did, father thrusting aside jobsworth officials to help his son over the line, the world weeping as one as it watched.

Then there was London 2012, when the BBC presenter Clare Balding spotted some very vigorous celebrations in the stands of the swimming pool after the South African Chad le Clos won the 100m butterfly. She invited the person responsible over and discovered it was Le Clos’s dad Burt. What followed was one of the finest television interviews of all time.

“Look at him, what a beautiful boy,” yelled Burt as Balding showed him a replay of the race. “He’s the boss, the most beautiful boy you will ever meet in your life, look at him. I love him!”

It was a perfect moment, demonstrating the unbreakable bond between the participant and their nearest and dearest.

Sadly, we will not see a repetition of that interview at these Games with perhaps the most famous sporting father in the world. In Tokyo, Covid restrictions prevented him from being there to see his daughter win a silver medal for the USA in the showjumping competition. Instead, Bruce Springsteen was obliged to watch on television, FaceTiming his daughter Jessica immediately after she had come down from the podium to express his absolute delight. He vowed that next time he would be there to savour the moment. Disappointingly, Jessica was not selected for the team in Paris, and Bruce will be elsewhere, delivering a four-hour-long hit marathon in some stadium elsewhere instead.

But even if he were, he would not be able to compete with the bond demonstrated by one parent at these Games. And I don’t mean Mick Jagger watching the fencing with his seven-year-old son, Devereux.

Fencing is the ultimate individual sport, one swordsperson against another. Participants are on their own as they feint, parry and riposte. But, after she was defeated in the last 16 of the women’s individual sabre competition on Monday, the Egyptian competitor Nada Hafez revealed she had had company up on the piste. She is seven months pregnant.

“What appears to you as two players on the podium, they were actually three! It was me, my competitor, and my yet to come to our world little baby!” she wrote on her Instagram account.

When the youngster is born, they will come complete with a ready-made boast: the only baby in the nursery school to have been directly involved in Olympic competition. Not even Robbie Daley can match that claim.