There’s one small problem with interviewing Daley Thompson about the world athletics championships in 1983: he can’t remember much about them. True, they were 34 years ago, but these were the inaugural “worlds” and he did win decathlon gold to become Britain’s first athletics world champion.
Let’s stick with what he can remember about Helsinki: “It was good, they were the first world championships and the sport needed it. I think I was rooming with Steve Cram. I had a groin injury and wasn’t 100% but I thought ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ Helsinki was a bit cold but the crowd was good, they liked their athletics.”
Thompson edged ahead of his perennial rival, Jurgen Hingsen, in the opening event, the 100m, and never lost his lead. The key moments occurred in Hingsen’s strongest disciplines, the high jump and discus, when Thompson outperformed him.
Thompson apologises for his sketchy memory. “I’m always like this,” he says. “A few years ago, Allan Wells and I were sent out to Russia in advance of London 2012. We went to the stadium in Moscow where we won Olympic gold in 1980. Allan could remember everything, he even noted how the seating had changed. I was wondering if we were in the right stadium.”
Helsinki fell in the middle of three glorious seasons. In 1982 he took Commonwealth and European gold, setting a world record in the latter and being named BBC Sports Personality of the Year. The following June, Hingsen broke the world record but Thompson re-established his supremacy by winning in Finland. Twelve months later, he successfully defended his Olympic title in Los Angeles, regaining the world record.
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A return of three Commonwealth, two European and two Olympic titles, and one world championship surely makes him Britain’s greatest athlete. Yet when he was interviewed in 2008, a newspaper began by asking: “Why do we find it so hard to love Daley Thompson?”
But who was the “we”? Was it the British public or the media? A Times reporter, who covered the decathlete in his prime, described him as “objectionable, charmless and rude”. Thompson recognises that he treated the press with the same disdain Donald Trump now shows them in America. “They didn’t understand why I didn’t want anything to do with them. They were a different generation; middle-aged blokes,” he says. “They thought I should be grateful that they should ordain to write about me. I wasn’t.”
This antipathy put him in the same company as three other British sporting contemporaries: Ian Botham, Nick Faldo and Nigel Mansell. The two “all-rounders” had big enough personalities to transcend their differences with the media. They were men with whom the average bloke liked the idea of sharing a beer. Faldo and Mansell, by contrast, only looked small when they engaged in petty feuds with reporters. The beer analogy is misleading in Thompson’s case, though, because he didn’t touch alcohol: “I tried it when I was a teenager but I just don’t like the taste. Besides, I don’t think the world is ready for a drunk me.”
At the Montreal Olympics in 1976 he had his first meeting with Bruce Jenner, who would take gold. The American has become more famous for his role in the Kardashian family soap opera, undergoing gender re-assignment to become Caitlyn Jenner. To the 18-year-old Thompson he was a hero.
“He was the standard so I bugged him loads at the Games then saw him a few times after,” he says. “He was fantastic, he would have me round to his Malibu home. Like most, I found what he has now done unbelievable. I’m not sure I would have been brave enough. I felt sorry that anyone should have had to live ‘not as themselves’ for 50, 60 years.”
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Thompson was just as capable of grabbing the headlines. The Olympic gold in 1984 was marked by the first of his notorious T-shirts. “Is the world’s second best athlete gay?” was the question (a reference to rumours about US favourite Carl Lewis) emblazoned on the front. There was another two years later when he won European gold in Stuttgart, beating Hingsen in front of his home crowd. In another provocation, it read: “Boris, Bernhard and Daley — Germany’s favourite sons.”
He was at it again 12 years ago when London beat Paris for the right to hold the 2012 Olympics. The offending garment listed great British victories over the French such as Agincourt, Waterloo and... Singapore — the venue for the IOC’s announcement of the host city. So where are the T-shirts now? “I don’t know, maybe in a storage unit. I should probably dig them out and auction them off for charity.” What about your medals, where are they? “Oh, I gave them away.” To whom? “Training partners.”
Really? “Yeah. Zenny [Pan Zeniou, a Cyprus-born decathlete] and Snowy [Brooks, who represented Barbados in the 1972 Olympics]. They worked as hard as me, I just happened to have more talent. If you come to my house you won’t see any signs of my career, though I have been meaning to get the medals back because my 15-year-old son has never seen them.”
The victory in 1986 is his favourite memory. “The best two days of my sporting life,” he says. “I had 85,000 spectators in the stadium against me, plus those two [Hingsen and fellow German Siggi Wentz]. I was in Cologne last month to make a programme with Jurgen about 50 years of sport and colour television in Germany, because our duel in Stuttgart was such a big thing. It was really cool that they thought to invite me.”
The Germany trip was one of several media appearances he still undertakes — he is involved with Bridgestone’s Chase Your Dream No Matter What campaign — but most of his time now is taken up running a gym in Putney. What about the current state of British athletics?
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“I’m not sure athletes now are as tough physically or mentally as they need to be,” he says. “Let me give you an example: David Ottley, a javelin thrower who won Olympic silver, spent some training with me under my coach Frank Dick. One day Dave said, ‘I can’t believe how much my stomach’s hurting’. Frank asked why. ‘It’s all these sit-ups you asked me to do’, Dave replied. Frank had written: do 4-6 sets [of 20]. Dave had read, do 46.
“The point is that he did them without question. Frank would make me do 3,000 javelin, 2,000 discus throws a month, 1,000 shot puts. If he had said 6,000 I’d have done them. I may be cocky and big-headed but I worked really hard.”
