Leon Taylor was five minutes early when he rang the office for his pre-arranged phone interview.

“I hope it’s okay,” said Leon, “I’m just out walking Dexter.”

Dexter, it turns out, is Leon’s pride and joy – a two-year-old rescue dog who Leon and his partner of seven years Allie have had for about a year.

“He’s delightfully disobedient,” laughs Leon, “so I might have to ring you back if he runs off. He’s a mixed breed. There’s a bit of greyhound in him, a bit of whippet, a bit of American Staffie and a few other breeds as well. He’s slowly getting better but he can be very mischievous!”

While there may be problems if Dexter runs off, at least if he jumps into a river or a lake there should be no cause for alarm because Leon would just dive in after him.

Leon, of course, is one of the greatest divers ever produced by this country, boasting medals at Olympic, world, European and Commonwealth Games levels.

He is also one of the most decorated sportsmen ever produced in Cheltenham – a place he still refers to as “my home town”.

To listen to him talk now, whether it be over the phone or on television where he is such natural, you’d think the success he has enjoyed in and out of the pool was something that was always going to happen.

How wrong you would be.

“I was a problem child,” said Leon very matter-of-factly. “I was my parents’ first child and almost from day one I gave them the runaround. I was very happy but I just seemed to need attention... all of the time.

“I was born about nine months after their wedding and on their wedding day my parents looked so happy. Then I was born and a picture was taken when I was around one and they looked as though they had aged 10 years!

“I wanted to be active all the time. My parents would put me in a baby bouncer in the hallway but that was only alright as long as I could see people

“My parents were struggling to cope and they took me to see a doctor, who categorised me as a ‘problem child’ and suggested that I could be sedated to give them a rest!

“My dad said, ‘There’s no way my son is going to be sedated’ so they had to come up with another plan.”

And they did. Roy and Sue, who still live in the same house in Hatherley where they raised Leon, 39, and his sister Nadine, who is three years younger, all those years ago decided that the only solution was to tire out baby Leon.

So by the age of one little Leon was a regular at Montpellier Gymnastics Club, taking part in tumble tots or mother and baby gymnastics.

He was also taken to swimming lessons at a very early age and not long after was introduced to judo.

As he got slightly older he played football and rugby as his parents tried every trick in the book to tire him out.

“I didn’t get on with football but I enjoyed playing rugby,” he said.

In fact, Leon was to become quite a decent school boy rugby player.

“I was captain of the rugby team in Year 9 at Bournside School,” he said with justifiable pride. “The trouble was I kept getting stamped on and I had to stopped playing because by this time I was the national junior diving champion and it didn’t look very good standing on the diving board covered in bruises!”

There was no let-up in Leon’s sporting activities in those formative years even when the family went on holiday.

“We used to go to Cornwall,” he recalled, “and I’d be boogie boarding and then surfing. I was at my happiest when I was moving.”

That desire to move didn’t always sit comfortably with his teachers at Benhall Infant School and St Mark’s Junior School, of course.

“School was tough because they wanted me to sit still and concentrate, both of which I found difficult,” remembers Leon.

As he grew older he did manage to channel his energy in a more positive way, so much so that he was appointed head boy at Bournside Sixth Form Centre.

“Bournside Sixth Form was great for me,” he said. “I studied PE, psychology and economics and I made some great friends there. I got an A, B and a C at A-level which was okay for someone who couldn’t sit still!”

As is so often the case with top sportsmen and women, Leon fell into his chosen sport almost by accident.

“It was my first year at St Mark’s,” explained Leon. “It was the inter-schools’ swimming gala and by that age I’d become a very accomplished swimmer.

“They were looking for volunteers to swim front crawl, breaststroke and backstroke. I stuck my hand up and just kept it up and I didn’t really hear them say ‘diving’ but my hand was still in the air so they chose me for that as well.

“I’d always jumped around on diving boards and had jumped in the pool off the boards wearing armbands at the age of four I think. That wouldn’t happen now!

“I had a sense of balance and awareness because of all the gymnastics I’d been doing but I’d had no formal diving training.

“I finished fourth, which wasn’t bad for a first go but after that I won that competition every year. My gymnastics gave me great aerial awareness, I could do a handstand and I always knew where I was in relation to the water. I was labelled ‘talented’ but actually I was ‘prepared’.”

Whether he was talented, prepared or both, the eight-year-old Leon had shown enough to the watching Cheltenham Swimming Club diving coach Dave Turner to suggest that he had a real future in the sport.

Turner was, of course, spot on but Leon was by no means a one-trick pony.

By the age of 11 he was competing in the national junior age group championships at gymnastics, swimming and diving and doing rather well.

“I was fourth in the gymnastics, 16th in the backstroke at Crystal Palace and I won gold in the age group diving which was my first national title,” he said.

Success can, of course, bring with it problems and Leon was soon faced with a stark choice – diving or gymnastics.

“I could continue to do swimming – that was still my first love – because I used to get up at 5am and train for two hours before school,” said Leon.

“But gymnastics and diving were both after school and the coaches said that I had to choose one or the other if I was to reach the next level.

“I asked my dad what he thought and he asked me which sport I enjoyed the most. I said ‘diving’ and that was it.”

Leon continued to swim competitively in backstroke at county and district level for another three years before concentrating solely on his diving.

By then he was already dominating the national junior championships – and that domination was to be carried forward to the national championships where he was the men’s 10m individual and synchro champion from 1994 to 2006.

In 1992, at the age of 13, he was called up to represent Great Britain in the European Junior Championships.

“I was so happy,” Leon recalled, “I thought we’d be going on a plane and I was so excited.”

In fact, it was a bus and not a plane that took Leon to the championships because they were being held in Leeds and there was to be further disappointment when he finished only seventh.

“Yes, that was a bit of a shock,” he admitted. “I’d been beating everyone at national level and didn’t realise there were divers out there that were that good. In those days there was no internet to monitor your overseas competitors.

“I thought, ‘I’ve got some work to do here’. It was a reality check and just what I needed because I realised that if I wanted to make it to the Olympics I had to keep getting better.”

There was more disappointment for the teenaged Leon two years later when he was named as a non-travelling reserve for the England team competing in the Commonwealth Games in Canada.

“That was a blow,” he said, “you don’t get closer than that.”

Leon was a fighter, though, and with the support of Bournside School, Cheltenham Recreation Centre – “I trained there until 1997, they were a fantastic help,” Leon said – and his coaches, initiallly Dave Turner and then Ian Barr, Leon was to realise his dream when he was selected for the 1996 Olympic Games.

But as you’d expect, it was not a selection that was in any way straightforward.

Leon takes up the story. “I was about to take my A-levels,” he said. “I was on study leave but I had to travel to the US and then Mexico for the Olympic qualifiers.

“I remember dragging my revision books round with me. Then I got back home and I had to go to Edinburgh for the Olympic trials and sat my first A-level exam two days later.”

It was to all prove worthwhile, of course – as were the many training weekend trips to Sheffield and Plymouth in the preceding years to train on their 10m boards because Cheltenham had only a 5m board.

Like pretty much all athletes who have competed in the Olympics, Leon says that the ‘greatest show on earth’ really is just that.

“I remember watching the 1984 Olympics on TV when I was just six with my dad,” he said. “I was transfixed. Daley Thompson was on the podium after he’d won his gold and he was whistling while the national anthem was being played.

“I asked my dad why he was doing that and he said, ‘Probably to stop himself crying’.

“I thought he must be in trouble because whenever I cried it was because I had done something wrong.

“But my dad told me he was almost in tears because he was so happy. He told me that he’d retained his Olympic gold medal and from that moment I wanted to go the Olympics so much.”

When he got there 12 years later the Games in Atlanta were everything the young Leon had hoped they would be.

“It was incredible,” he said. “I remember Linford Christie and Colin Jackson chatting to me as if we were team-mates… and of course we were!

“The opening ceremony was an amazing experience. Walking out in front of 110,000 people, what an honour although I do remember it being very tiring.”

Not that Leon would be in action any time soon. The 10m diving was scheduled right at the end of the two-week spectacular, so it was off to training camp for Leon and his diving mates.

When he returned he found himself in an awkward situation, however. “I was the first person to see Linford Christie after he was disqualified for two false starts,” he said.

“He was the defending 100m champion and it was very controversial. He did acknowledge me but he was very sombre. It just goes to show the highs and lows of sport.”

Fortunately for Leon, his high dives were to provide no low points in Atlanta, although he does remember the first round taking forever and a day to be completed.

“There were 52 divers competing for 18 spots in the semi-final,” he said. “It was a killer. We each had six dives which took 1.5 seconds each but the prelim lasted for 4-and-a-half hours. It took so long.”

Luckily for Leon he was to prove a man of patience as he qualified as one of the top 18 divers. And the waiting was not all bad as he was able to get up close and personal while one of the great sporting achievements was played out in the Olympic stadium next door to the diving pool before his fifth dive.

“It was the men’s 200m final and Michael Johnson ran 19.32,” he said. “I was watching it on TV but I could hear the roar of the crowd outside.

“It was surround sound like you’d never believe. It was groundbreaking and it was groundshaking.”

Leon’s own competition was to finish at the semi-final stage – he needed to finish in the top 12 to make it into the final but ended 18th.

Nevetheless he was pleased with his first showing on the biggest stage in sport.

“You always want to do better but I look back with pride on those Games,” he said.

He has every right to, of course, and his performances soon brought him many admiring glances. Pretty soon the top US colleges came calling offering him scholarships to move stateside while closer to home there were options to go to Leeds, Sheffield or Plymouth universities.

As it happened Leon decided to do nothing almost for the first time in his life.

National Lottery funding would be made available for divers in mid-1998 but any move to the US would scupper Leon’s hopes of securing financial support.

He moved to Sheffield to train full time, he signed on, collecting £70 every two weeks. He was able to up his training to five hours a day but he remembers it being “a tough time”.

Typical of Leon, he could see a positive in these tough times. “When the grant did come through I was financially savvy,” he said.

Leon’s next stop was Sheffield Hallam University where he enrolled in 1998 although he had to step away in early 1999 so he could concentrate on the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

That year of 1998 was to be a big one for Leon in more ways than one.

“I won my first major international medal,” he said proudly. “It was in the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur.”

The fact that he won any medal at all – he finished third – was a major achievement in itself because his preparations were severely hampered by a back injury.

“I was on strong pain killers and was having physio every day,” he said. “I wasn’t able to do any training in the week before the event and all I could do was stand on the board and visualise my dives.

“Instead of physically performing them I would imagine performing them hundreds of times while I stood at the back of the 10m board.

“Fortunately, I was able to get in the water and I was able to put my marker down.”

That wasn’t the only time that year that Leon put a marker down. He also invented the world’s most difficult dive which included a back 2.5 somersaults and 2.5 twists in the piked position.

It was to remain the most difficult dive for the next 11 years and Leon said: “I wanted to push the boundaries. The thing about diving, it’s not tape to line, there’s no obvious winner. It’s down to the judges.

“Russia and China were getting so favourably marked and it was almost impossible for anyone to beat them at this time.

“It was quite frustrating and there was a lot of time spent getting annoyed over things we just couldn’t control.”

The impact of Leon’s trailblazing dive can be judged not only by the number of medals he went on to win but the subsequent meteoric rise of Tom Daley, who owes some of his success to the influence of Leon.

They first got to know each other in 2004 when Daley was aged only 10. Leon was to act as his mentor.

“The baton was passed on to a precocious talent,” he said. “He was always destined for superstardom. Even at the age of 10 it was obvious how good he was and within five years he was world champion.”

Leon, meanwhile, had got the taste for medals in Malaysia and he added to his haul with a bronze in the 10m synchro at the European championships in 1999.

A year later he was back at the Olympics where he came mighty close to returning from Down Under with a medal.

“I finished fourth in the synchro with Pete Waterfield,” he said. “That was a slap in the face. We were one place short of our goal and that’s as hard as it comes in sport, especially a subjective one.”

There was also disappointment in the individual where Leon finished 13th and missed out on a place in the final again. “That was agonising,” he admitted.

There was to be further pain for Leon in 2001 when he needed to have reconstructive surgery on his right shoulder. He had another operation on the same shoulder in 2002 and thought briefly about retiring.

Those thoughts were soon put to one side, though, and he was mighty pleased they were because Leon considers 2003 to 2005 to be his peak years in the sport.

Before that he had collected another Commonwealth Games medal – this time a silver in 2002.

“Manchester was incredible,” said Leon. “That was my experience of diving in front of a home crowd. There were 3,000 people chanting my name, stamping their feet. You could hardly hear the announcer call your names, it was epic.”

The big disappointment for Leon was that he missed out on the gold medal by 0.3 of a point although there was some consolation in the fact that it was his great diving buddy Waterfield who beat him to top spot.

“Of course I was wishing it was me rather than him winning gold,” admitted Leon, “so yes, while I was pleased for him it was tinged with disappointment.”

The pair teamed up for another fourth place in the synchro in a major tournament in 2003 – this time in the world championships in Barcelona – before all their hard work finally came to fruition in the Olympics in Athens a year later when they won silver in the 10m synchro.

“When Pete and I were on the podium we were the first divers from Great Britain to win an Olympic medal for 44 years,” said Leon. “What an honour. It was a major breakthrough because the perception of the judges had changed.”

Leon also reached the final of the individual event for the first time. He eventually finished sixth but at this stage of his career and with the form he was in he felt he could have done better than that.

“I was disappointed with sixth,” he said. “In 2003 and 2004 I’d always been in the top six in all the major championships. Sometimes I’d been on the podium and I’d beaten all the divers who I was up against in Athens at some stage.

“If I’d been at my best I’d have been on the podium in Athens. The difference in the synchro was that Pete and I didn’t have to be at our best to win a medal.”

He returned to England – and Cheltenham – as a hero and so proud were the people of his home town that he was a granted a civic ceremony.

It was a time when open-top bus tours were all the rage in Cheltenham following the remarkable success of Cheltenham Town Football Club in the late 1990s.

“I remember the bus tour well,” he said. “It was a huge honour but at the same time I remember feeling a bit awkward.

“If a football team or the Olympic team had an open-top bus tour – and I’d been on an open-top bus with the Olympic team – there were lots of people waving to the crowd.

“With mine, it was just me and yes, it did make me feel a bit awkward.”

At least Leon was accompanied on the bus by his family and, typical of Leon, he also invited a couple of his Bournside teachers who had done so much to support him in his formative years.

“Mr Miller and Dr Twinning both came along,” he said. “They were very supportive while I was at Bournside although sadly Dr Twinning has now passed away.”

The following year saw Leon complete the set when he won bronze with his pal Pete at the world championships in Montreal.

He also narrowly missed out on what would have been Britain’s first ever individual world diving medal when he made a slight mistake on the required dive in the individual event.

The year also saw Leon’s shoulder injury flare up again – he was to need further reconstructive surgery and again in 2005 and again in 2006 – a total of four surgeries on the same shoulder.

He returned to Sheffield Hallam University in 2006 to study business and finance – he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the university in 2015 for services to sport – but still had his eye on one more Olympics.

“The fairytale was to go to Beijing and for Waterfield and Taylor to win gold, retire and live happily ever after,” he said.

Sadly for Leon, his body cried enough is enough and he was forced to announce his retirement on 30th May 2008, the very same day that he signed a freelance contract with the BBC as a diving commentator.

“That BBC contract didn’t happen by accident,” said Leon. “I’d made some contacts at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006 and asked Steve Cram to give me a tour of the BBC studios. He introduced me to some influential people like Dave Gordon (head of major events) and it went from there.”

It was no surprise to anyone who knew him that Leon was an instant hit with the Beeb, performing on the small screen with as much confidence as he had when he first started diving all those years ago.

So accomplished was he, in fact, that he looked at the possibility of moving into television presenting, both of sports and children’s programmes.

However, they turned out not to be as exciting roles as he thought. ”There was a lot of sitting around and just reading scripts,” he said, “so I gravitated towards the live stuff.”

He became a familiar face on the ITV celebrity diving show Splash and said: ”That was like standing on the diving board where you had to perform. The difference was that it wasn’t me wearing the budgie smugglers!”

Leon, who spends most of his time in London these days – although he remains a frequent visitor to Cheltenham – has a multitude of activities that keep him busy pretty much all the year round.

As well as his ongoing mentoring – he numbers top paralympian Sophie Christiansen among his mentees – and TV work, he is a keynote speaker and helps his girlfriend run Yogahaven – a chain of yoga studios.

He hasn’t lost the competitive spirit either that made him such a formidable diving competitor on the world stage for so long.

“I did an ultra-marathon in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy last June,” he said. “It was 58km and I completed it in 11 hours 59 minutes.

“I really enjoyed it. The eight to nine months preparing for it was wonderful but it’s not the be-all and end-all.”

This year’s challenge – Leon likes a challenge – saw him take part in a one-day bike ride in the Alps in France, which was another 10 to 11 hour marathon.

And next year to mark him reaching the ‘ big four O’ in November, he is planning his toughest test yet – the Ironman in Lanzarote.

“That will be really tough because it’s in May and it will be really hot and it’s always very windy,” he said. “I’m not looking to compete for Great Britain or anything like but I do like pushing myself.”

Leon Taylor has always loved a challenge. He’s overcome them all, of course, but it sounds like he may have his work cut out with Dexter.

Midway through the interview, he said: “Hang on a minute, Dexter’s just run off!”

So how did Dexter behave for the remainder of the interview?

“A bit better,” he laughed, “but he was on the lead!”