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"I have an inordinate amount of faith in my own ability to do things," Thompson says crisply, though his voice and manner have softened since 1984. He is known for a charming braggadocio that runs to self-aggrandizing T shirts. And if asked how he is, he will probably still reply, "A little short of fantastic." But marriage last year to his childhood sweetheart settled Thompson noticeably, and the birth of a daughter twelve weeks prematurely jumbled his regimen. "My little girl weighed less than a bag of sugar. It was incredible how tiny she was. Yet she was perfectly formed." He stopped training long enough to help worry her through the crisis of her entry to life. Nine months later, everything but his reputation for invincibility is well.
"I have to win just to justify the amount of work I've put in," Thompson says. "I don't think of it as the work since the last success but as the work since the very beginning. To me, it's always been accumulative. But even to lose, I think I'd still do it. No matter how it's gone or how it goes, I wouldn't change anything. It fulfills me to be what I am."
Thorpe won his Olympic decathlon at Stockholm in 1912. "You, sir," declared King Gustav, "are the world's greatest athlete." To which Thorpe replied with touching simplicity, "Thanks, King." Thompson has often heard the description "world's greatest athlete" -- in fact, he has been called the greatest of all time -- but has never seriously proclaimed the title. "It's merely a tag," he says. He does feel akin to Thorpe though. "We're all his descendants -- Mathias, Rafer Johnson, Jenner, me. We've all shared something. It's passed down from one to the next. It's never anyone's property. It's only mine for the moment."
His square name is Francis Morgan Thompson. "Daley" is a corruption of Ayodele, an African endearment bestowed by his Nigerian father and mispronounced by his Scottish mother. It means "joy enters the house." "That was the only thing," in Thompson's bittersweet estimation, "that they got absolutely right." His London childhood was something out of Thackeray, not Dickens, though classic shadows like boarding schools were involved. "Since forever, I always thought I was going to be the best in the world at something. My school friends used to laugh at me, but I kept searching for the thing that would express who I am. There's only one key for every lock, you know. As soon as I found the decathlon, I knew it was me."
Though at first he resisted the idea of giving up sprinting, the perverseness of specializing in versatility appealed to his sense of justice and mischief. "In any walk of life, there'll always be a bloke more talented in this or that, who's smarter in some way, or richer, or faster, or just better suited. But can the thing that he was given be lined up against everything you've got?" At 6 ft. 1/2 in. and 195 lbs., much too thick and blocky for track, though not nearly brawny or flexible enough for the field, Thompson is ideally constructed for none of the ten events. "But I'm happy with my dimensions," he says. "I've got by so far. Would I change anything at all? Sure, I would. I'd take Paul Newman's eyes."