Britain’s teenage Olympic diver Tom Daley started at a new school on Tuesday after his parents said he had been bullied at his previous college.
Daley, 15, said his first day at the private Plymouth College in Devon, southwest England, had been “really good.”
“Everybody has been very supportive, there is a completely different atmosphere,” he told BBC television. “Plymouth College has loads of different elite athletes. It’s great to go into a school with other athletes that understand what you are going through, how much training you have to do and keep up with school work.”
PHOTO: REUTERS
Daley captured the public imagination after representing Britain at the Beijing Games when he had just turned 14.
He was the second-youngest British Olympian and was already a European diving champion at the age of 13.
But that fame made life hard for him at his previous school, state-funded Eggbuckland Community College in Plymouth, where he said other pupils had called him names and thrown paper at him.
“It just got really annoying and I wanted to have a normal school life,” he said. “Eight months of ‘Speedo Boy, how much are your legs worth? I’ll break them.’ That’s not something you really want to go to school and hear.”
His father has described his son as suffering severe bullying, although Daley said it had been blown out of proportion and he tried to ignore it.
Daley was taken out of the college after newspaper reports of the name-calling made it hard for him to return.
Eggbuckland principal Katrina Borowski told the Guardian a number of “immature” pupils had been disciplined and that the college had a clear policy for dealing with student conflicts.
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