Pages

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Well done Matt Mitcham

A male diver performs a reverse from a 3 meter...Image via Wikipedia
Well done for your gold Matthew Mitcham! Our gay sports hero!

AUSTRALIAN Matthew Mitcham last night produced the dive of his life to win a shock gold medal in the men’s 10m platform and end host nation China’s stranglehold on the Beijing Olympic diving competition.
The 20-year-old Sydney diver produced the highest scoring dive in the history of the Olympics with his sixth and final effort to become Australia’s first male Olympic gold medallist in diving since Dick Eve in 1924.
Mitcham finished with an overall score of 537.95 to defeat Zhou (533.15), who had led the final until the final round, to grab Australia’s second diving medal of the Games.
“It’s absolutely surreal. I never thought that this would be possible,” Mitcham said.
“I wasn’t even sure of my medal chances at all. After I did my last dive and I saw I was in first, I thought, “That’s it, it’s a silver medal, I am so happy with this’ and then I won. I can’t believe it, I’m so happy.
“I had some very wise words and some very good advice before coming into the 10m competition, to just enjoy it, have fun and that’s what I thought right from the very first dive in the prelims to the very last dive in the final.

“I was definitely stressing it to myself, just enjoy the moment, there is nothing you can do to change what’s about to happen, so just enjoy it and it worked.”
The result was a major turn-around for Mitcham from his performance in the 3m springboard, in which he failed to make the final after struggling to keep his nerves under control.
“Absoultely everything I have done has been for this,” Mitcham said.
“Coming back and doing everything that I did was to win an Olympic gold medal. That was my aim when I was training every single day, twice a day, 11 sessions a week, 30 hours a week, before every single dive, it was like `I want to win Olympic gold’ and that made me try my hardest in every single training session for the last year and a half.




    Enhanced by Zemanta

    Friday, August 01, 2008

    Good luck to out Athlete Matthew Mitcham in Bejing

    Aquatic athletes are as revered in Australia as NFL stars are in the United States, so the news that Matthew Mitcham is gay made headlines throughout Australia. 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.”

    One might think that the fuss would have bothered his fellow divers, but they’re nonchalant about his sexual orientation. “They don’t seem to mind that I’m a big homo,” says Mitcham, who trains six hours a day at the New South Wales Institute of Sport, a facility for elite athletes in 31 sports at Sydney’s Olympic Park. “I make jokes about it all the time. I haven’t made an issue of it, so they just reciprocate that attitude.” Plus, he says, because of its artistry and grace, diving is “such an easy sport to be out in — much easier than football, where you have to be rugged and strong and masculine.”

    Mitcham is so focused on Beijing that he hasn’t been out with friends for more than a year and a half. And now that he’s won his ticket to China, he’ll be cheered poolside by Lachlan, courtesy of a $5,000 travel grant from Johnson & Johnson’s Athlete Family Support Program (no, there wasn’t an outcry, as you might expect in the States). His mom may be there too, thanks to some Sydney gay men and lesbians who offered to cover her expenses. “I’m very proud to be part of the gay community,” he says.

    Well done Matthew! I am so pleased that in Australia Johnson and Johnson supported Matthew (without any drama) and so proud of Sydneys’ Gay and Lesbian community for sending over mum too! I am supposed to be supporting England but with my dual nationality, I will be supporting you mate.

    Source : Advocate
    Digg it: source : at A gay mens blog

    Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
    • Blue Dot
    • bodytext
    • Furl
    • Netscape
    • NewsVine
    • Reddit
    • Spurl
    • StumbleUpon
    • Technorati
    • del.icio.us