Tom Daley Takes Center Stage at the Rio Olympics As 2008 Gold Medalist Matthew Mitcham Exits From Olympic Diving

In 2008, Matthew Mitcham stunned the world with his final dive in the ten-meter platform event at the Beijing Olympic games. With an extremely difficult dive (a risky two-and-a-half somersault with two-and-a-half twists) performed superbly, Mitcham earned the highest score in the history of the sport and secured the gold medal.

Of his great dive, NBC commentator Cynthia Potter declared, “Matthew Mitcham has done something that nobody in the world thought anybody in the world could do!”

However, as Linda Rapp has noted, NBC failed to report that Mitcham was the only openly gay man among the over 11,000 athletes at the Beijing games. The network also failed to show any reaction shots of Mitcham’s partner, Lachlan Fletcher, in the stands and relegated coverage of the subsequent medal ceremony to its web site.

But viewers of many other networks around the world saw Mitcham’s emotion as he realized that he had won the unexpected gold medal. As he exited the pool deck, he climbed into the stands and kissed both his proud and overjoyed partner and his supportive mother. (Fletcher was there as a result of a travel grant that Mitcham received from the Johnson & Johnson Support Program for Olympic athletes—the first time such an award had been granted to support the travel of a same-sex partner.)

Mitcham’s victory propelled him into the annals of great Olympic athletes. Australians voted him the Sports Performer of the year in 2008; Australian Post issued a stamp in his honor; and he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia.

He also became a role model for gay athletes, a position he did not seek, but accepted graciously: “I never made the choice to be a role model, but as soon as somebody looks up to you or finds something in you that they like, you become one. And that’s something you either honor and respect or reject. I honor it.”

Mitcham’s openness about his homosexuality–“it wasn’t until I was totally honest about it all that it wasn’t a problem,” he said–was in stark contrast with the secretiveness of Australia’s other great Olympian, swimmer Ian Thorpe, who repeatedly denied his homosexuality until he finally came out in a highly touted interview on Australian television in 2014. After years of adamantly denying rumors that he was gay, in the interview Thorpe discussed the pain he experienced in coming to terms with his sexuality while also battling depression.

Despite Mitcham’s extraordinary performance in Beijing, he experienced difficulty finding major corporate sponsors until, in February 2009, he signed a deal with Telstra, an Australian communications company.

After the triumph in Beijing, Mitcham experienced a number of disappointments in his diving career, though he continued to compile a record that is the envy of other elite divers.

For example, in the 2009 World Aquatics Championship in Rome, he finished third in the ten-meter platform event that was won by teen British diving phenom, Tom Daley, who was just emerging on the world scene.

In the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, Mitcham won four silver medals, but again lost in the ten-meter event to Daley.

In 2011, Mitcham’s diving suffered as a result of an abdominal injury and an addiction to methamphetamine.

However, in December of that year, he returned to his old form and qualified to compete in the 2012 London Olympics. Unfortunately, there he narrowly failed to qualify for the finals in the ten-meter event.

As his diving career seemed to falter, Mitcham began a parallel career as an Australian television personality and cabaret entertainer.

But in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in August 2014, Mitcham ended his gold medal drought. He and Dominic Bedggood won the gold medal in the synchronized three-meter platform dive, edging out the English team of Tom Daley and James Denny, who won the silver medal. The following day, Daley won the gold medal in the ten-meter individual platform dive.

The achievement in the synchronized three-meter dive marked the first time in the history of the Commonwealth Games that two openly gay athletes have won gold and silver in an event, though, as pointed out above, in the 2010 Games–three years before Daley came out–he and Mitcham also finished first and second in the ten-meter competition.

Although some observers were looking forward to another match-up between Mitcham and Daley in the Rio Olympics, in January of this year Mitcham announced his retirement. Saying that he would concentrate henceforth on his media and entertainment career, Mitcham told the Australian Broadcasting Company News, “I have achieved everything I hoped for, including the big three–Olympic gold in 2008, world number one in 2010, and Commonwealth gold in 2014, which could never have happened without all the help I’ve had along the way.”

Mitcham is covering the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio for Australia’s Channel 7:

Get the #buzzfrombrazil with @matthew_mitcham and @TeiganNash #7olympics #rio2016 https://t.co/Hd56kxjf5U

— 7Olympics (@7olympics) August 6, 2016

Enter Tom DaleyÂ

Mitcham was the only openly gay male athlete competing in the 2008 Olympics. In contrast, Tom Daley will be one of 11 openly gay male athletes competing in Rio, along with 33 female athletes who identify as lesbian, bisexual, or intersex. (For a list of these Olympians, see Outsports.)

Daley, however, is the only openly gay diver who will take to the platform in 2016. He will compete in at least two events, the men’s synchronized ten-meter dive, scheduled for Monday, August 8,  and the men’s ten-meter platform dive, scheduled for Friday, August 19.

Despite his youth, the 22-year-old Daley is an experienced Olympian. At the age of 14, he competed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where he finished seventh in the ten-meter platform event and eighth in the ten-meter synchronized competition.

Daley came into his own in 2012, when he won several international and United Kingdom championships and became a favorite to win a medal at the London Olympics.

However, Daley and his partner in the synchronized diving event disappointed the home crowd by finishing in fourth place, thus increasing the pressure on Daley to earn a medal in the ten-meter platform competition.

In the ten-meter platform event, Daley became locked in an exciting contest with China’s Qiu Bo and the U.S.’s David Boudia, whom he led until the final dive. Unfortunately, Daley’s last dive had a lower degree of difficulty than the dives performed by Bo and Boudia, and they edged him out for the gold and silver medals. Still, his bronze medal was wildly celebrated by the London viewers and made Daley a British heartthrob.

Following the London Olympics, in October 2012, Daley easily triumphed in the World Junior Diving Championships in Australia. In 2013, however, his competitive diving was severely restricted by a triceps injury.

But Daley, who by now had become a television personality in the U.K., made news when he issued a wrenching YouTube video to announce that he was in a relationship with a man.Â

It was subsequently revealed that the man with whom Daley was involved was Academy Award-winning screenwriter and activist Dustin Lance Black. Black wrote the screenplay for Gus Van Sant’s  Harvey Milk biopic Milk (2008), and also served on the board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which sponsored the federal lawsuit against Proposition 8. Following the 2010 federal district court trial challenging Proposition 8 before Judge Vaughn Walker, Black wrote the play 8, based on actual events and testimony, in order to disseminate information about the historic trial.

The two revealed their engagement in a tongue-in-cheek announcement in the October 1, 2015 Births, Marriages, and Deaths section of the (London) Times: “The engagement is announced between Tom, son of Robert and Debra Daley of Plymouth, and Lance, son of Jeff Bisch of Philadelphia and Anne Bisch of Lake Providence.”

Meanwhile, Daley worked hard to overcome a case of post-Olympic blues and an aversion to the difficult dive that propelled Matthew Mitcham to Olympic glory in 2008.

With a new coach, Daley developed a new “twister dive” that may make a difference to his success or failure in Rio. He continued a series of medal-winning performances in World Championship, British Championships, and other competitions and began training seriously for the Rio Games.

In the video below, Daley explains the deprivations an Olympian must endure even during Christmas in Los Angeles.

The following video, an excellent documentary from Britain’s ITV, charts Daley’s journey to Rio.

Daley will face stiff competition in Rio, especially from Chinese diver Qui Bo and 2012 gold medalist American David Boudia in the ten-meter platform competition; in the synchronized diving event Daley and Daniel Goodfellow (photo, below) will have to overcome the favored Chinese pair Lin Yue and Chen Aisen and the American duo David Boudia and Steele Johnson. But many of us will be cheering on Tom Daley.

So too may Greg Louganis, who will also be in Rio, serving as an official athlete mentor of the U.S. diving team.

Louganis is widely regarded as the greatest diver in history. After having won a silver medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, he dominated diving competitions throughout the 1980s, winning two gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and two more at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Although he did not compete as an openly gay athlete, after his retirement he acknowledged both his homosexuality and his status as a person living with HIV.

Louganis knows well the hard work, discipline, and incredible dedication that it takes to become an Olympian. In addition, he knows from first-hand knowledge the bullying that both Mitcham and Daley experienced as adolescents. Although he will certainly fulfill his role as mentor to U.S. athletes at Rio, he will no doubt also have a special empathy for the particular challenges Daley faces as an openly gay athlete and wish him a spectacular Olympics.

UPDATE

On August 8, 2016, Daley and Daniel Goodfellow secured an Olympic bronze medal in the ten-meter synchronized diving event. They were propelled  past the rival Ukranian and German duos by performing two outstanding final dives. The Chinese team of Lin Yue and Chen Aisen dominated the event and won the gold medal; the American team of David Boudia and Steele Johnson took the silver medal.

In the video below, Daley remarks on winning the bronze in Rio.

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 UPDATE 2

On August 19, Daley led the field of the ten-meter platform competitors, finishing first in the preliminary round with an incredible score of 571.85. With such a performance, he became a strong favorite to win the gold medal in the event.

Alas, however, Daley bombed in the semi-finals on August 20, finishing last among the 18 divers who survived the preliminary round.Â

In an interview following his disastrous performance, Daley said he was heartbroken but was already looking forward to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

Image of Matthew Mitcham, Tom Daley via Facebook