London 2012 Olympics: coach comparing Tom Daley with Anna Kournikova belittling and counter-productive He achieved all this while a schoolboy being bullied between studying for exams and while his father was dying of cancer; he did not achieve this under 24/7, money-no-object training at a Chinese sports boot camp. When he won the world title in Rome, it was one of the great achievements by any British sportsman, especially as he was - and still is - competing against full-time professionals. So it is a little hard to fathom exactly what Evangulov aims to inspire in Daley by this public lashing. Perhaps he feels it is the lad's last chance, so this is a form of "tough love," shock treatment calculated to make the youngster try even harder in the final push before the Games. Or maybe it is just a matter of cultural differences. Evangulov, a remarkably open and forthright customer from the old Soviet school, comes over as a sort of eccentric Russian answer to our Dutch athletics chief Charles van Commenee, and genuinely seems to believe he is the one man with the answers. "The difference between me and the other people who love him is that I am an expert," he said. We can win but I know how to do it. They don't. Basically, he believes Daley must train harder to match the others who are all diving for silver behind the incomparable Chinese. Yes, but how? As the youngster, who has suffered from injury woes this past couple of years while growing into an unrecognisably strapping version of the one-time 14-year-old wunderkind, protested: "I'm doing as much as I can. I'm pushing myself as hard as I can go without my body breaking. His partner, Waterfield, and his management team are adamant that Daley has not stinted on his training and that he has not been in any way sidetracked by the commercial demands on him. If Evangulov has any evidence to the contrary, he has not yet produced any. The odd thing is that the coach's criticism of Daley came accompanied by comments which suggest he still believes implicitly in the youngster's ability to win two medals at the Games. In public, then, surely it would be more beneficial if he laid off Daley and perhaps offered more carrots and less stick. The comparison to Kournikova was belittling. And wrong. For whatever happens next, the boy has already proved himself a winner.