The flight over to London from his home in Los Angeles for the pre-Olympic Games Paris 2024 training camp couldn't have been more different from his previous four Olympic Games for diver and British sporting icon Tom Daley.
The British public has grown up with Daley, seeing him emerge on the 10m platform as a 14-year-old at the Olympic Games Beijing 2008. He claimed an individual bronze medal in front of a home crowd at the Olympic Games London 2012, just a year after his dad died from brain cancer.
At the Olympic Games Rio 2016, he won a synchro bronze with Dan Goodfellow, and finally, emotionally, a longed-for gold medal at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020, alongside Matty Lee, in the synchro. Add a largely forgotten but still impressive bronze in the individual event in Japan, and that's four Olympic medals for the now 30-year-old.
Travel to the Olympic Games this time around though, Olympic icon or not, Daley is very much like any other parent flying with their kids.
"I was worried how it was going to go," said Daley with a smile to the multiple journalists he was speaking to on 17 July, just 12 days before competing at his fifth Olympic Games. "Luckily, it was a night flight, so Robbie, who travels all the time, was fine because he's six now, so he's a bit more like an adult. Phoenix, however, is very much the second child – wriggly, wants to climb everything, jump on everything. He was quiet but I had to like wrangle him the whole time."
Daley, whose Olympics will be done and dusted on 29 July when he takes to his sole event - the men's synchronised 10m platform - this time alongside Noah Williams with Lee absent due to injury, is in good spirits.
Results this year with Williams include silver at the 2024 World Championships in Doha, and gold, silver and bronze at a trio of World Cup series events.
Social media posts show Daley training at an outdoor pool in Los Angeles near where he lives with husband Dustin Lance Black and their two children, but with much travel home to his beloved London and the Aquatics Centre from the 2012 Olympic Games where Team GB train.
With so much written about the man in question, we wanted Daley to speak for himself, with a Q&A of the aforementioned interview, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.