As we say on the back cover of the ‘What Men Do’ Guide, “Today’s Hero is the football icon with the Balls to tell us he’s gay.”

While football seemed the obvious example, this is equally applicable to all sportsmen – non-more so than a guy who spends the majority of his time in the public eye wearing nothing but a speedo.

But what really makes Tom Daley our Hero of 2013 is that he’s not saying ‘I’m gay, deal with it’ – in fact he hasn’t even said he’s gay – but rather he’s putting his Balls out there and saying ‘yeah, I’m dating a guy, so fucking what?’. He is showing us the Real Tom Daley and for a 19 year old – regardless of gender preference – that takes Balls.

We – my two fellow writers and myself – have been trying to assess the effects that Daley will have, especially on young males. Afterall, your first shag with a female is a major marking for most teenage guys even though teenage sex is usually 25% itchy nuts and 75% ego. But maybe now a young guy will learn to embrace attraction and accept that, as we say in the Guide, “it may be clear that it’s girls, girls, girls that get your motor running, but then there is that one guy…”

The definition of a modern Hero was something we struggled with when writing the WMD Guide, settling on the Balls to be Real and live life to it’s full potential. While this doesn’t quite embrace the full heroic ideal, it goes some way to explaining what we mean by a Hero.

And Tom’s actions have shown that he definitely belongs to the Tribe of Heroes. He met someone who made him happy, enriched his life, and so he took the Risk and embraced it. Now he’s publicly announced that he’s with another man, not to grab headlines but purely because he wants to ‘say it like it is’, to Risk exposing his Real self – presumably because it makes little sense to him to be anything other than Real.

Wow, does this guy have Balls or what. And to display this at age 19 … dare we say ‘That’s What Men Do’.