Tom Daley loves “all things stitching,” and the Olympic gold medalist’s knitting is helping send money to a charity for brain tumors.
Olympic reporting blew up last week with pictures of the diver for Great Britain sitting in the stands, intently knitting a pink-purple shape. He was watching women’s diving on Sunday at the time. Later, he announced on his Instagram that the pink-purple shape was a doggie jumper. He must have finished it because on Monday morning, he had a new project in hand, this time a large creation of white yarn.
Daley calls knitting his way of “finding calm, mindfulness,” and says that it relieves stress. A few days ago, right after his gold medal win for synchronized diving, he revealed one of his knitting projects, a tiny yarn cozy for his gold medal, featuring the flag of Great Britain on one side and Japan on the other. He also, adorably, apologized for featuring his medal and Olympic win on his fiber arts blog.
What he doesn’t knit or crochet for himself or his family (there are a lot of very tiny cute clothes for his niblings), he raffles off to raise money for charity. These days, his charity of choice is The Brain Tumour Charity, an organization seeking to launch a three-year trial for a cannabis-based drug to treat aggressive brain cancer. The promise of the trial is personal to Tom Daley, who lost his father to a brain tumor called a glioblastoma in 2011, when the Olympic diver was only 17.
In early July, one of Daley’s sweaters, a rainbow jumper in a chunky knit, raised £5,787 ($8044) for the charity.
“We are reaching out to all you individual heroes and supporters, to help fund this groundbreaking trial,” said Daley in a video to promote the trial, made just before the Olympics.
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