Most of us have to go out and find sport for it to become a powerful force in our lives. But in Daley Thompson’s case, sport found him.
For many decathlon is one of the guiding stars of the Olympic Games.
The event’s ten tests are a hothouse designed to find the best male all-around athlete in the world and have given us great champions such as Jim Thorpe, Ashton Eaton and Thompson.
It hasn’t always been given that billing. Spectator interest in multi-eventing has waxed and waned over the years. At Rome 1960, New York Herald Tribune reporter Red Smith turned the legend inside out to label it ‘the world’s dullest competition’ and a ‘blaze of mediocrity.’
Smith’s words never carried any truth but, 20 years later in Moscow, Thompson would offer the strongest rebuttal since Thorpe took to track and field in 1912.
It was a journey that started in Notting Hill - not the Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts world of trips to the Ritz and dates with fruitarians, but one of crunching deprivation.
Thompson, born to a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother, saw his parents separate when he was six and his dad shot on the street when Daley was 13.
At seven, he was sent to a boarding school in Sussex described as ‘a place for troubled children.’
“My mum had two or three jobs for the first 18 years of my life, so I understand the value of hard work,” Thompson told the Times in a recent interview.
“My dad’s murder was pretty traumatic, but it happens. People get killed, but life goes on and you’ve got to make the best of it.
“I don’t spend much time dwelling on my mental health and I don’t look back, either."
Hyper-competitive Thompson started out at Newham & Essex Beagles Athletics Club and saw himself as a sprinter early on while turning his hand to shot put and high jump.
On a whim he entered the Welsh open decathlon in June 1975 at Cwmbran - he won, and so the pattern was set.
Thompson’s sheer explosiveness saw sprinting and jumping form the backbone of his dominance, struggling at times with the closing 1500m, the bane of so many multi-eventers.
He was a 4x100m relay bronze medallist in his own right at the 1986 European Championships, and finished sixth in the individual pole vault at the same year’s Commonwealth Games.
He was only 140 points shy of American Bob Mathias’s 1948 world record as a teenager and the points system fascinated him, a propelling force for his desire to always beat the best and the rest.
Thompson’s first Olympic experience was at Montreal 1976 as an 18-year-old, finishing 18th in an event won by Bruce Jenner - who predicted the Brit would win the Olympic decathlon title in time.
"I couldn't get enough of it," Thompson told the father of modern athletics reporting Cord Nelson for his book Track’s Greatest Champions.
"I was in total awe of almost all the others there. It was a learning experience I'll never forget for the rest of my life.”
Awe was not an emotion Thompson was accustomed to - always eschewing role models and rejecting coaching for much of his career, training on his own for eight hours every day.
It was a deep respect for his disciplines that catapulted him into 1980, when he broke the world record at Gotzis in May and went on to dominate the Olympic field amid the tumult of Moscow’s Games.
Thompson threw himself at the defence of his title in 1984, relocating to California for much of the build-up year and upping his already exhaustive training schedule by two hours a day.
He was driven forward by competition from the likes of German Jurgen Hingsen, with the pair breaking the world record five times between them in the Los Angeles cycle.
Thompson did it when it mattered - and became the second man after Bob Mathias to win two Olympic decathlon gold medals in 1984.
Recurring hamstring issues imposed retirement on Thompson and you sense he would have continued to further Games had his body not intervened. Thompson lives alone in Hove, Sussex and has five children.
I’ve just done the 2.6 challenge. Why don’t you give it a go? Pick 2.6 or 26 or206 of anything. It’s to help save the UK’s charities. #twopointsixchallenge now it’s done I can say it was almost fun! Let me know what’s your challenge pic.twitter.com/9es0kVnoLP
— Daley Thompson (@Daley_thompson) May 6, 2020
The now-62-year-old has never been backward in coming forward on key issues - and while he may not welcome the title of a trailblazer for black British people, he has been an orb of inspiration for a generation in his decades walking the sporting world as a king, including fellow Olympic champion Denise Lewis.
“I genuinely don’t recognise the old descriptions of myself that say I was arrogant or rude or difficult,” he told the Times.
“I started competing before the first black person had even played football for England so maybe subliminally some of the negativity I received was because of the colour of my skin.
“The most important part of my life is the bit I’m in this very second. Loads of my friends live in the past, but I try not to. I’m too busy making the future bright.”
Sportsbeat 2020