Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix remembers feeling her heart beating so fast that it “physically hurt”. She was making her way to the top of the 10m platform, at the Sandwell Aquatics Centre in Birmingham. Her legs were shaking, her calves felt soft and flimsy. The crowd was roaring. But she focused, quietened her mind and jumped.
A second and a half later, she was under the water and knew she had just secured Commonwealth gold. “Usually it’s very quiet under the water,” she says, “but because there were so many people in the crowd, you could feel the thunder. I’ve never felt anything like that – it was magical.”
Her eyes are sparkling, the memory of her diving success fresh in her mind. It was the first of two golds and a silver medal she won in the pool at the Games this summer aged just 17, plus two European titles she secured in September.
That, combined with her relative celebrity as the daughter of First Dates maitre d’ Fred Sirieix, saw her become the breakout star in Birmingham and the public voted her National Lottery’s Athlete of the Year.
She has had the season of dreams, but it almost did not happen. As she confides to Telegraph Sport, at the beginning of this year she was on the brink of quitting the sport. “Before, it was where I was most scared,” she says of the 10m diving platform, “and now it’s where I feel the most peace.”
Watching Spendolini-Sirieix today, bounding up the stairs leading to the towering platform at the London Aquatics Centre, you could not detect an ounce of fear. She has lived and breathed the sport since she was eight years old, when she was talent-spotted by British Swimming at her south London school. She spends six days a-week training, and last year became an Olympian at 16. Even now, as she talks animatedly with her hands, her long fingernails are painted in an intricate cobalt design that mirrors the pool water reflection she dives into.
But that is not the whole story, she says. “I was scared from a young age, probably like” – she pauses for a few seconds – “my whole career. Maybe since I was 10. It gets worse as you rationalise diving. I was thinking too much, worrying. It would come and go, I would talk about it and it would get better. But mental blocks come with stress and the blocks would become bigger. It would get a lot harder to deal with.”
