I met him, very briefly, when he was in his early teens. His family lived opposite a family member of mine in a modest property, but my family knew the family antics reasonably well in a neighbourly way.
He was insufferable even then. His diving very clearly made him the most important of 3 children, the one who got the most attention from his ailing father, he courted publicly, they would often have things like welcome home banners etc when he came back from anywhere for the rest of the street to see. Everything had to be a constant celebration and fuss about how wonderful he was. He was always centre of attention in any situation.
Nothing really any different than you will have seen online or on his documentaries. He was always needing a lot of fuss around him because even though he was a fame whore, he was also always (pretending to be) on the verge of throwing in the diving and the parents were to an extent, reliant on his income towards the end of the father’s life, he even funded an extension to the house and new kitchen…which is fair enough considering how much of their own income they lost to support his diving. I suspect he did it to be the favourite son.
He was bullied at school, but to an extent brought it on himself by behaving like he was better than everyone else, I don’t think it was actually anywhere near as bad as he claims. He wasn’t missing school or coming home in tears every day, in fact the school were providing some remote support when he went away to competitions and camps and doing their best to accommodate his every need…he was their star pupil and where he went to school was in the newspapers etc, they really looked after him. I went to that school myself (slightly before he did) and I can assure you that they didn’t give a shit about individual kids unless they were ‘special’ in some way, and the chosen ones got the exact opposite approach. He just suddenly claimed he was being bullied and literally the next minute he’d been offered a free place at the local private school, which the school got a lot of publicly out of.
When I was introduced to him, out in the street, it was an awkward moment, as if I was supposed to comment on the fact he was a famous diver rather than just a random kid of a neighbour of a relative. Although I did actually know quite a lot about him and the family as they were the gossip of that street.
In his late teens he was sponsored by a local car dealership and therefore given a brand new free car, complete with personalised number plates…it had ‘dive’ in it just to make it really obvious, it was advertised they’d done that with a photo of the car in local news and he was out on the roads a lot. He then moved out of his mother’s house and bought himself a property of equivalent size but of older style and in a more expensive nearby area (extremely close to where I was living at the time). I knew exactly where he’d moved to because of the car. No loud parties, he was in and out quite a lot, I assumed he liked the idea of driving around the city with everyone noticing his car.
He bought 2 indoor cats, then abruptly uped and left for London, selling the house a little while later after leaving it empty for a while. The cats went to his mother, maybe he got bored of them.
Any minor news of him makes it to the local rag here and he is heavily featured, whereby people in the comments section rip him apart and state disinterest in his being reported on. Aside from that…since he moved to London when he was about 18/19…I’ve not seen or heard anything about him actually being here in Plymouth at all. He built himself up as this ‘local hero’ figure for years and then did a runner as soon as another opportunity presented itself.
I think he’s very much a social climber and had his eye on the prize of tv stardom from the start, the diving was just a means of getting there. I also don’t believe a word of this body image nonsense, he takes his kit off at every opportunity and hasn’t stopped doing so even when he finished formal training work. He doesn’t worry about his body due to anything other than extreme vanity.
Also, the mother isn’t as old as she looks, she’s a bit overweight and a bit of a scruff which ages her. He’s the eldest and she had him quite young. I doubt there’s much age gap between his mother and his husband.
