When Matthew Mitcham arrived at the Sydney Aquatic Centre on a cold June day wrapped in a heavy coat and jeans (it’s winter Down Under), it didn’t seem possible that he’d strip down to a pair of Speedos and willingly dive into water again and again. The Olympic Games were two months away, and the 20-year-old diver with a pierced tongue was (and still is) dead-set on beating his rivals and winning the gold.
He did just that May 11 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at the AT&T USA Diving Grand Prix, one of the major annual meets put on by FINA, the international governing body for swimming, diving, and water polo. There, at an outdoor pool in windy conditions, Mitcham won the 10-meter platform, his specialty, defeating both 2004 Olympic gold medalist Hu Jia of China and fellow Australian and 2004 silver medalist Matthew Helm. Mitcham, currently ranked third in the world, also beat world number 1 Sascha Klein of Germany.
Diving is a mercurial sport in which one small move can mean the difference between a perfect 10 and a belly flop -- success depends almost as much on chance as it does skill. But in Beijing, if Mitcham nails his dives -- they include a forward 3½-somersault pike and an incredibly difficult backward three-somersault tuck performed from an arm stand -- he could very well see the Australian flag raised above him. (He also competes in the three-meter springboard event, but less successfully: He didn’t finish in the top six in Fort Lauderdale, and his world ranking is 10.)
Should he win, Mitcham will join the very small club of openly gay Olympic gold medalists.
But as significant as that moment would be for gay athletes everywhere, Mitcham has only one goal in mind. “I just want to be known as the Australian diver who did really well at the Olympics,” he says. “It’s everybody else who thinks it’s special when homosexuality and elite sport go together.”
Aquatic athletes are as revered in Australia as NFL stars are in the United States, so the news that Mitcham is gay made headlines throughout his home country. It was The Sydney Morning Herald that broke the story; in the course of profiling the diver as part of its Olympics coverage, a reporter from the paper asked Mitcham whom he lived with.
“I hadn’t planned to do it at all,” Mitcham says today. “It was just a question” -- which he answered by saying he lived with his partner of two years, Lachlan -- “and it went from there.”
The subsequent attention turned out to be a bit of a distraction for Mitcham, who was hunkered down for pre-Olympic training when the story ran in The Herald May 24. He received so many media requests that his coach had to set aside a morning for interviews and photo shoots a couple weeks later. But by 2 p.m. Mitcham had to be back on the diving platform. It was the only access the press has had to the diver since he came out because, as he explains, he needs to concentrate on training and “not worry about what I’m going to say.”
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