By Skye Slatcher
Summer 2024 was filled to the brim with sports. The global highlight was surely the Olympics and LSE too was represented this year. I recently spoke to Kyle Kothari, an Olympic diver and LSE alumnus (Geography, 2019). He reached the final for the 10m platform at the Paris games – an incredible achievement.
Kyle was candid about the Olympic experience: “I would say it is stressful… But when you’re in the bubble, you don’t really quite realise how big it is until you finish.” With the finals now just over a month ago, he reflects on it with a bit more distance. With the bronze medal score being the same as what he had achieved at the World Championships, he said it was hard for it not to feel like a missed opportunity.
Aside from the important sporting side of things, these games were filled with some viral moments. He replicated the internet-famous Turkish shooter’s pose when he walked out for his final. He even got started on a crochet tie with Tom Daley’s expert help, but never got around to finishing it. But what we all want to know: Kyle’s verdict on the chocolate muffins. “Bang average. Overhyped.”
His sporting career started in gymnastics when he was three. Growing up he tried a number of sports, thanks to his dad’s sportiness. At 11, he suffered a major injury during a competition – a snapped elbow. Around that time he saw some talent leaflets at his primary school: “Crystal Palace Diving Club in South London was looking for talented kids to train and take to the next Olympics – at the time, London or Rio.” Of 70,000 applicants Kyle Kothari was one of the four selected. From then on diving gradually became his sporting focus.
Having achieved gold at the European Championships, silver at the Commonwealth Games, and various other accolades, his successful career has not been without hurdles, which took the form of a series of major injuries. In 2019, he ruptured his right Achilles but he remained hopeful for his chances at Tokyo when the games were delayed due to COVID-19. Six months later he ruptured his other Achilles. Tokyo was no longer a possibility. To have reached the Paris Olympics and to be aiming for LA is an incredible feat.
I would be remiss not to talk to him about his LSE experience. He recalled being “on a flight to Malaysia for a competition and writing [his] GY100 essay or GY212 essays, and submitting it as [he] landed, and then having to go straight into training”. He is one of few high-level athletes to come out of LSE, and when I asked him whether he thought LSE helped his career, he was honest: “short answer: no.”
After LSE and having dealt with his injuries, Kyle found himself at JP Morgan like many grads of this uni. “I decided to apply for that internship at JP Morgan to set up a career just in case I couldn’t return to sport… I had the intention of staying there.” Nonetheless he had been training, and after seven months of Treasury Services, he returned to full-time diving. “They offered me a full-time role, but I was like, ‘well, I would love to do that but I can’t not take this risk’.” And so he dived back into the world he was never sure he would fully return to.
On the challenges of being a professional athlete, Kyle shared this: “Unless you’re willing to sacrifice whatever career [you could have outside of sports], just to see what you’re capable of, then you’re not going to stay in sport. It becomes a harder decision at each stage as [your] career becomes more and more important. And it’s a decision that I’m still making, right now.”
I asked him whether the thought of representing Team GB ever entered his mind when competing on an international level. To this he gave a simple no. While it is a nice thought, individual divers are rarely thinking about the team. He elaborated: “You might have watched some of these Netflix documentaries that have come out recently about the sprinters and all that stuff. Diving is not quite that cutthroat, but still, every person is fighting for their career, for their sponsorship, for their salary. There’s a lot of pressure.”
One of my last questions to him was about his sporting idols. He has never admired someone “just because they’re good at kicking your ball or good at falling off a board”. Instead, he spoke to me about the diving team’s physio, Gareth Ziyambi: “He’s got an amazing story about being a Black physio in sport and how difficult it was for him to be taken seriously, and what he’s done for the sport behind the scenes that no one will ever see is super inspiring… It’s those kinds of stories that don’t really get the media attention that they deserve – they’re the people that are inspiring to me.”
He finished with a message I think a lot of us could learn from. The sentiment is that comparison is the thief of joy. It is undoubtedly something I am still grappling with. He explained that he believes that once you reach the top levels of sport, talent is what separates you and talent is beyond your control. I think Kyle put it best: “When you realise that that’s okay, you become very fixated with yourself and what you are capable of. You have to be happy with how far you can push yourself with what you have.”
At 26, he knows he’s in his “age-prime”. He will be 30 for the next Olympics, and while it is impossible to know what will happen in the next four years, LA 2028 is in Kyle’s plans. The next four years will not be full-time training. That’s a lifestyle Kyle has had since 2019, which he now says is “just so dull”. Beyond working toward LA28, his goal for now is bringing back some “childlike play” to his training.
In the meantime, I’ll be figuring out how to get myself to LA for 2028.
