Matthew Mitcham

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Matthew Mitcham Diving
Matthew Mitcham.jpg

Personal information
Surname: Matthew John Mitcham
Nickname (s): Frosted
Nationality: AustraliaAustralia Australia
Discipline (s) : Artistic / tower / synchronized jumping
Society: Abbotsleigh Diving Club
Perfect 10 Diving Club
Birthday: March 2nd, 1988
Place of birth: Brisbane
Size: 174 cm
Weight: 67 kg

Matthew Mitcham , OAM (born March 2, 1988 in Brisbane , Queensland ) is an Australian athlete in art and high diving . His greatest success so far is the Olympic gold medal in the 10 m high diving in Beijing in 2008.

life and career

He grew up on the outskirts of Brisbane and originally jumped on the trampoline competitively . At the age of eleven he was discovered by Wang Tong Xiang from the Australian Institute of Sport water diving program, which has its water diving training center in the Chandler Aquatic Center on the outskirts of Brisbane. For several years he trained trampoline and water jumping.

At the age of 16 he had a fatigue fracture on one lumbar vertebra and 13 ganglions on both of his wrists .

In the following years he won several medals nationally and internationally.

At the Commonwealth Games 2006 in March, he reached fourth place on the 3 m board and in the 3 m synchronized jumping with Scott Robertson and fifth place on the 1 m board and 10 m tower.

2006 was also his senior year of high school . The old health problems, together with a lot of school work, a hectic competition calendar and daily training from five in the morning overwhelmed him. Some time after the competitions in March, he felt burned out and no longer enjoyed water jumping. He stopped, met with friends and did many things that would have been impossible as a professional athlete. He had a lot of fun and recovered physically, emotionally and mentally. During this time he also met his partner Lachlan Fletcher. After a coach offer from Chava Sobrino in early 2007, he moved with his partner to Sydney and began to train again in March 2007 under the new coach at the New South Wales Institute of Sport .

Mitcham at the 2009 Mardi Gras in Sydney

At the Australian Championships in 2008, Mitcham won the 1-meter, 3-meter and 10-meter individual competition. On May 11, 2008, he won the 10m competition at the annual AT&T USA Diving Grand Prix in Fort Lauderdale ahead of 2004 Olympic gold medalist Hu Jia and 2004 silver medalist Mathew Helm . In the 3-meter competition, he did not make the top six.

In an interview on a series of articles about potentially successful Olympic candidates, a reporter asked him who he would live with, which as a gay man he answered truthfully. The Sydney Morning Herald then ran the headline on May 24, 2008: “Out, proud and ready to go for gold.” (For example: Outed, proud and ready for gold.) This was followed by great national and international media interest, so that even two Weeks later, during the preparations for the Olympics, half a day had to be reserved for press conferences.

At the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, he competed in artificial jumping from the 3 m board and 10 m high diving. In the 3 m competition he was 16th and did not reach the final. In high diving, he qualified second for the final. There he had mixed success in the first five jumps and was 34 points behind the Chinese Zhou Luxin at this point . After Zhou jumped the worst on the last jump and got 74.80 points, it would have taken Mitcham 107.30 points, a very high value for this competition, to beat him. Mitcham made an almost perfect jump and scored 112.10 points, the highest value ever achieved in an Olympic single jump competition. The final score was 537.95 points, ahead of Zhou with 533.15 points. Mitcham won the second Olympic water jump medal for Australia and prevented the Chinese jumpers from winning all water jump gold medals . For Australia, it is also the first men's gold diving medal since Dick Eve in 1924.

Mitcham led the 2009 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras on

With financial help from the Johnson & Johnson Athlete Family Support Program , his partner Lachlan Fletcher (* 1978) was able to support him and some gays and lesbians from Sydney paid for his mother's travel expenses. Outsports.com counted eleven of the 11,028 athletes in Beijing who were known to be openly gay or bisexual, among which Mitcham was the only man, but were wrong because Mitcham's teammate Mathew Helm has long been openly gay. Because of the gold medal, the Australian Post issued a stamp with a face value of 50 Australian cents. In November 2008, he was named Australian Athlete of the Year at an event hosted by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald , an AU $ 50,000 Audience Award.

It was also successful for Mitcham at the Commonwealth Games 2010 in Delhi . He won four silver medals, in the individual from the 1 m board and 10 m tower as well as in 3 m and 10 m synchronized jumping.

Mitcham is involved in the gay and lesbian sports and culture festival GayGames. At the VIII GayGames in Cologne in August 2010, Mitcham took the oath of sport during the opening ceremony. He is considered the muse of the Australian painter Ross Watson. During the GayGames there was an exhibition in Cologne that dealt exclusively with his portraits.

In December 2012 he published his autobiography under the title Twists and Turns with HarperCollins.

On February 22, 2020, he married Luke Rutherford, to whom he had been engaged since June 2019.

Web links

Commons : Matthew Mitcham  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g Harley Dennett: A Backward Three-Somersault Tuck (With a Twist) , The Advocate, August 26, 2008
  2. a b c AAP: Australian diver Matthew Mitcham captures Chinese hearts , news.com.au, August 24, 2008
  3. Jessica Halloran: Out, proud and ready to go for gold , The Sydney Morning Herald smh.com.au, May 24, 2008
  4. Carsten Weidemann: Goldschnuckel Mitcham and his Lover , queer.de, August 26, 2008
  5. Beijing 2008: Intermediate Results - Men's 10m Platform Final ( Memento from March 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  6. Rebecca Williams: Sensational dive earns Matthew Mitcham gold medal in Beijing , foxsports.com.au, 23 August 2008
  7. Carsten Weidemann: Olympia: Eleven openly homo- and bisexual athletes sighted , queer.de, August 11, 2008
  8. Perfect 10 - Matt Helm ( Memento of the original dated December 30, 2014) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , DNA magazine No. 83 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dnamagazine.com.au
  9. DNA Readers' E-Mails, letters and ramblings… ( Memento of the original from March 29, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , DNA Magazine No. 105; DNA Magazine made the same mistake and is referred to its own issue # 83 in a letter to the editor. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dnamagazine.com.au
  10. Gay Olympic hero receives his own stamp , queer.de, September 10, 2008
  11. ^ Scott Spits: Matthew Mitcham the 2008 Sports Performer of the Year , The Age, Nov. 27, 2008
  12. Matthew Mitcham: Our wedding video on YouTube , April 19, 2020, accessed April 19, 2020.
  13. Nick Duffy: Olympic diving champion Matthew Mitcham is engaged. Pink News , June 4, 2019, accessed April 19, 2020 .