Tom Daley Didn't Stop Believing!

Congratulations, Tom, for scooping the bronze medal at the 2012 London Olympics in the 10m platform diving final.

That's certainly a great way to honour his late father. 

"It was a tough competition," Daley told the Guardian. "I don't normally compete at that time of night for one, and there were 32 competitors. Having to wait for half an hour between dives was tough. At the end my legs were starting to get tired. I've done my job today but not by the most comfortable of margins."

* Full story after break

London 2012: Tom Daley's bronze sparks the Olympics' best pool party

Great Britain's Tom Daley celebrates his bronze medal with team-mates by jumping into the pool at the Aquatics Centre. Photograph: Andrew Boyers/Action Images

You may think that diving is all about the quest for physical perfection, the application of science in the defiance of gravity. Or you may think that it is, to quote Woody from Toy Story, "falling with style". Either way, it is an activity with one ultimate aim: to impress people.

It is probably why Tom Daley is so well suited to it. Ever since he emerged as a precocious 14-year-old, the cheeky water sprite has always looked like someone who enjoys the attention. And, frankly, in this sport you had better, because there is nothing intrinsically enjoyable about hurling your body into a wet wall at 30mph. Critics had said before this competition that the attention would be Daley's undoing – and for a short while they were right, though not in the way they anticipated. The greedy flashes of cameras distracted the teenager on his first dive and he climbed out of the water to a dream-shattering score of 75. But Daley does not mind causing a fuss, so he and his coach stopped the competition until they won a do-over. The crowd were given a stern warning – they were so keyed up, they even applauded when they were told off – and there were no more flashes for Daley.

With his perfect white teeth and skater boy hair, Daley always looks like he is on his way to the kind of party you are too old and uncool to get into. And there was a festive atmosphere here. That is not too difficult to create in diving, what with the hot tub, the bursts of indie rock filtering through the muggy air, the voyeuristic underwater camera, and the line-up of very fine bodies, all but a postage-stamp area of them on display. The trunks here are so tiny that not even the scientists at Cern know how they stay on.

After the second round Daley was in fifth. He appeared at the back of the platform, the way divers do, as if they've been beamed there by a teleporter. He wiped himself with his multi-coloured flannel – the one that looks like a comfort blanket – and threw it over the railing to the floor, a million miles away, where it landed with a thwock. He fiddled with his trunks, the ones that Stella McCartney had such difficulty designing because of their modest size.

At the end of the platform Daley turned and doubled over, slowly unfolding his legs above his head like a yogi. And then he pushed. He pushed away, rotated backwards and span to earth with his arms tucked behind his knees, drawing gyroscopic shapes in the air. At the end of that dive, he went into first place – the revelation on the scoreboard was greeted with a noise like an explosion.

Immediately, with the next dive, David Boudia of the USA topped him with a near flawless display. The story was the same the next round. Two rounds left. Daley performed a brilliant backwards dive with three and a half somersaults and entered the water so smoothly that he seemed to suck the water back in with him. Many of the punters here were in tiered seating far higher up than the board itself, embedded under the curves of the whaleback roof; some were at the other end of the racing pool, a good 80 metres away, from where Daley can have been only a dust mote settling gently on a glass table. But it did not matter. They knew their role: they had ooohed when a diver's head skimmed perilously close to the concrete cliff edge, and they were on-brand, chanting repeatedly for "Team GB". Now, the tension ratcheting, they applauded every dive – but especially when the score was lower than Daley's. By the final round, Lord Coe must have been rueing the missed opportunity of official London 2012 ear protection.

One by one the challengers had fallen away. Even Ivan Garcia Navarro, the Mexican who had denied Daley a medal in the synchronised event, could not impress the judges with his pioneering "forward two and a half somersault with three twists", also known as the all-you-can-eat buffet of diving. Boudia went above Daley with his final dive, and so did Qiu Bo, the Chinese favourite, but Daley had his bronze.

Comedian Miranda Hart had threatened to strip down to her bra and knickers and jump in the pool if Daley won gold. As it was, Daley's support team mobbed him and threw themselves in en masse, trainers still on, wallets, presumably, still in pockets. While Qiu hit the showers and turned his face to the wall in anguish, Team GB produced the most enviable pool party this Olympics will host, to the teentastic soundtrack of Don't Stop Believing. Daley hadn't, and neither, it seems, have we.

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