Mitcham's edited Gold

by Timothy Tan

It is the 23rd of August, 2008, and in the cavernous arena of the Beijing National Aquatics Center -- alternately known as the Water Cube -- a young Australian diver prepares to take the platform in the finals of the men's 10m event. For what is to be the last time this night, he lunges briskly into position, turns, and catapults over the edge. With a difficulty of 3.8, his final dive is as technically complex as it gets at this level, and necessarily so, as it will take nothing less than that to narrow the gap by which he trails the current leader, China's already-medalled Zhou Luxin. He lands in the water, and a hush falls over the stands

Then, an audible gasp punctures the commentary. Matthew Mitcham, in his debut Olympics, receives the highest single score ever awarded in Olympic diving -- 112.10, with four of seven judges posting tens. In a gesture that almost seems rehearsed, Mitcham turns and bows to the gallery before crumpling to his knees, overcome with visible emotion.

The euphoria is already spreading like wildfire pool-side, but there is one more competitor left in the programme - the other Chinese diver Huo Liang. The assembled Chinese fans whoop in anticipation, but no, his final dive scores in the middling 80s -- and now, the rest of the Cube erupts in mad applause. The unthinkable has happened. Mitcham, who is now being mobbed by every non-Chinese diver and coach, has come back from debilitating burnout to deny the Chinese team their expected sweep of 8-for-8 diving golds, the same team that has been responsible for the host nation's largest medal haul in these Games. The drought that has hung over the sport for years has now broken.

The victory ceremony will feature a blushing, beaming Mitcham, and a media walkabout in which he will leap into the stands to hand over his bouquet to his mother and partner. Amid the high-fives, kisses and flashing camera bulbs, a quintessential Olympics moment will be born, and Jacques Rogge will have scored another public-relations gold.

But the most intriguing part of this story has yet to be told. Viewers watching around the world will immediately register that Mitcham's partner, Lachlan Fletcher, is in fact a man. And visitors to his Facebook profile will discover that, for the most part, the scores of fans posting congratulations aren't even Australian. For Matthew Mitcham, the 20-year-old wunderkind from Sydney, has made history in more ways than one. Besides his record-breaking marks, he will also be remembered as the first openly gay diver to taste Olympic gold.

In the week or so since Mitcham's win, his status has gone from iconic to heroic, both online and elsewhere. Initially a rallying point for gay Olympics fans hungry for any representation, his journey to gold has gained currency even beyond the community as the most typical yet atypical of Olympic victories. Typical for being a story of mavericks and upsets. Atypical for the salve it has given to the thousands of gay youth who see in Mitcham an analogue to their own lives: the unhappy and awkward adolescence, the struggle with depression and anxiety, the relief when he quit diving in 2006, and for a while, "partied and lived without regimen" - his own words. Naturally the symbolism of his win is so much more compelling for a gay person watching than it is for an Australian, who simply shares the accident of local origin.

Rennae Stubbs

Mitcham's feat is made even more unlikely when one considers that out of 10,500 Olympians that competed in Beijing, he happens to be the only out gay man (there are 10 other openly gay female athletes, one of them being Mitcham's compatriot, veteran tennis player Rennae Stubbs). This is an age where wedding bells ring for same-sex couples and presidential candidates hold forums on GLBT issues, yet numbers like these show how dismal the situation still is in many parts of society. Weirdly enough, though, performance at the Games has not been as lacklustre -- 7 out of 11 picked up medals, 4 of which were gold. This translates to a 64% medal conversion rate for our out athletes, making all the rhetoric about homophobia and sport seem hollow.

Mitcham, being the consummate athlete, has spoken in interviews of his wish to keep his profession and his sexuality separate. Up until the story broke in Australian media in May, he and his family had reservations about publicly coming out due to sponsorship issues. Unlike coming out in entertainment, or even politics, where controversy seems to be actively courted, there is no immediate benefit for a young athlete to be honest about his or her personal life. Considering the predatory nature of much of today's media, one might even call such openness altruistic.

To no one's surprise, the story has not registered at all in local media. But controversy has also been brewing over the failure to mention Mitcham's sexuality in virtually all broadcast coverage (print media has fared marginally better, with the AP devoting a few sentences to his personal backstory). In the US, NBC has come under fire for ignoring the entire angle throughout their commentary. An opportunity was there to point out the milestone unfolding on the screen - the only gay male athlete competing is also the only one capable of breaking the Chinese stranglehold on his sport. As expected, the usual detractors have complained that that would be an attempt to politicise the Games. By bringing in a non-sports element to the coverage, they protest, it sullies the sanctity of athletic achievement.

This is, of course, an outright lie. Mitcham's headline isn't that he is a gay athlete, but that he's the only one. The closest parallel would be when German weightlifter Matthias Steiner won his super-heavyweight event, beating the Russian favourite. Almost all the international media coverage didn't fail to leave out Steiner's wrenching medal ceremony, where, openly weeping, he held up a picture of his late wife who had died in a car crash years ago. If they had done so, readers and viewers would certainly have singled them out for journalistic negligence. The Games are mythologised precisely for these human-interest stories, and not simply for the records that are broken (with almost banal regularity this year).

And as far as I know, nobody was up in arms over "political" references when it came to coverage of the banned-then-not-banned Iraqi national team, or of Georgia's athletes after war broke out in South Ossetia. People had water-cooler debates over the Spanish basketball team's racism fiasco and most culpably, commentators openly speculated on the love lives of athletes - the straight ones, that is. Giggling over rumours of a Beard-Phelps romance seems to be par for the course, but documenting a gold medallist's partner support and commitment somehow ranks off-topic.

As for Matthew Mitcham, his most enduring achievement will perhaps be his most overlooked. For better or worse, the gay community is now obliged to shed the last vestiges of the persecution complex that has probably left many of us stunted and our potential untapped. Indeed, when emancipation is the overriding goal, we often become shadows of our most excellent selves. (Witness the socio-economic ruin in so many modern anti-colonial societies, most devastatingly in Mugabe's Zimbabwe.) Thanks to Mitcham and our other Olympic heroes, being gay need no longer be a crutch that props up an otherwise featureless life. As they have shown so inspiringly, it can sometimes be the least interesting part.  

Video links added by Yawning Bread:

Matthew Mitcham's dives. He kisses partner Lachlan Fletcher in the 14th minute of this 15-minute video
 

Interview

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