He
won the gold:
From gay icon, to Olympic champion, Australian, Matthew Mitcham has won his first gold medal. He is the only openly gay male athlete competing in Beijing. There are 9 lesbians and one bisexual woman competing alongside him.
In the last moment he snatched the gold from China's Zhou Luxin, achieving earning four perfect 10s on his last dive, a back two-and-a-half somersault with two-and-a-half twist and a difficulty of 3.8 earning him four perfect tens and a total of 112 from that dive alone. He finished with 537.95 points.via
PP
Australia's first
openly gay olympian
missed the finals:
Gay Australian diver Matthew Mitcham failed to make the finals of the men’s 3m springboard competition at the Beijing Olympics on Tuesday.
Mitcham finished 16th out of the 18 divers in the semi-final, with only the top 12 divers going through to the final round.
His teammate Robert Newbery made the final round with an 11th place finish in the preliminaries.
Mitcham still has a chance at a diving medal on Friday in his strongest event, the men’s 10m platform. The preliminary rounds will be held on Friday night.Matthew's site
here.
From
Towleroad:
Last month, the Sydney Morning Herald announced that Australian Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham had come out of the closet, but Mitcham, in a new interview with Australia's gay newspaper SX, says he's been out since he's 14. Mitcham, who will be Australia's first openly gay Olympian when he competes in Beijing, is now 20.
Says Mitcham: "It’s not really a big deal. It’s not like I’m a different person. It’s not like I was straight before. So nothing really has changed....I came out years ago. All that happened recently was that I was doing an interview with the Herald and there was a pretty innocuous question, ‘Who do I live with?’ and I just said ‘my partner Lachlan’. And the journalist was really excited – she thought it was absolutely wonderful!"
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