By Gary Barlow

Staff writer

Openly gay Australian diver Matthew Mitcham earned an impressive four perfect 10s on his last dive in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing Aug. 23, winning a gold medal.

“My cheeks hurt from smiling, my face hurts from the chlorine, my legs are sore from jumping up and down,” Mitcham said. “I’m in pain and I’m tired, but I’m so happy. I thought maybe I could have gotten the bronze or silver medal. In my wildest dreams, I got the gold medal.”

Mitcham’s victory in the 10-meter platform was a shocker—he became the first Australian since 1924 to win a gold medal in a diving competition and prevented the powerful Chinese team from sweeping all eight golds in diving.

No one was prouder than Mitcham’s mom, Vivien, who hugged her son and his partner, Lachlan Fletcher, just after Mitcham’s astonishing performance.

“Coming out publicly, that was a first,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “The highest score awarded to an Olympic dive ever, another first. How many more firsts can this child get? Can you find something else to be first in? He’s just done so well. He deserves it.”

For Mitcham and Fletcher it was a sweet reward after two years of ups and downs. Mitcham at one point retired from competitive diving.

“When I first met him, he was pretty unhappy, he wasn’t liking the diving in Brisbane at all, he didn’t want to do it, wasn’t happy being there,” Fletcher told the Herald. “It took a lot for him to retire and stop doing it because it had been his life for so long. He wanted to try and be happy again. He took time to do normal things that people do.”

But after a while, Fletcher said, Mitcham felt compelled to go back to what he did best.

“Then after five or six months he started to really miss it again and he had the opportunity to dive with Chavo (Sobrino, his coach),” Fletcher told the Herald. “He started that and loved it ever since, every second of it, which is great, to see him happy all the time.”

Outsports.com said Mitcham was the only athlete in the Olympics who’s been so public about being gay. But even that groundbreaking distinction was overshadowed last weekend by his spectacular performance. The dive that vaulted him past China’s Zhou Luxin was characterized by many Olympics experts as “the greatest dive ever” and it earned the highest diving score in Olympics history.

“The first dive wasn’t the best, the third dive wasn’t the best, but there was nothing I could do about it except just enjoy the moment,” Mitcham said. “I knew that the best diving would come, and the next three dives were really good for me.”

Mitcham and Sobrino knew his final dive—a back two-and-a-half somersault with two and a half twists—could earn huge points.

“It was his best dive and that’s why we put it at the end,” Sobrino said.

Mitcham said his efforts to overcome depression, much of it related to his teenage struggle to come to terms with being gay, prepared him for the high drama of Olympics competition.

“I wouldn’t have won if I hadn’t been through all that,” he told reporters.