Matthew Mitcham: the narrative of a gay sporting icon

Abstract

When Australian diver Matthew Mitcham produced a world-record score with his final dive from the 10m platform to win the gold medal at the Beijing Olympics, he did so as the ‘only openly gay man at the Olympics’. This paper examines the Australian print media's narrative of Mitcham leading into, during and after the Games. In the hetero-normative world of Australian sport, the normative narrative carries four storylines: performance, national identity, masculinity and significant relationships. Combined, these storylines resonate with audiences and have the potential to create the vortex of publicity required to launch an athlete into the world of sponsorship and celebrity. Initially, with few exceptions, the media fails to write the masculinity and significant-relationships storylines about Mitcham and he fails to gain sponsorship. However, free of the narrative conventions and constraints of an Olympic games, it is the very same media that proceed to write in the missing narratives post-Olympics and act almost as activists on Mitcham's behalf. The result is Mitcham's transformation into a marketable, popular sporting celebrity: sitting comfortably in both mainstream and LGBT culture and sport, a role model for young same-sex-attracted people, and a voice of experience about homophobia and issues of sexuality in sport. Leading into the London Olympics, stories about Mitcham contribute to an alternative masculine narrative that becomes available for young sportsmen and women to consider.

Keywords:

• sexuality
• narrative
• masculinity
• national identity
• celebrity

Notes

1. The term ‘digger’ was originally coined during the gold rushes of the 1850’s. It became colloquial during the first world war where ‘digger’ and ‘dig’ were used by soldiers as friendly terms of address equivalent to ‘cobber’ and ‘mate’. The term has tended to be defined in high-value laden ways: ‘a man for whom freedom, comradeship, a wide tolerance, and a strong sense of the innate worth of man, count for more than all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory in them’ (A.G. Butler, The digger: a study in democracy, 1945, in The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, p. 213).

2. Although each major city in Australia has its own daily newspapers, all are owned by either Newscorp or the Fairfax group. As such, the dailies in various cities often contain the same stories (or variations), especially in relation to world news, national politics and international sport. This is important to consider as, for example, in 2008 many of the 356 articles featuring ‘Matthew Mitcham’ in the text were actually the same, or similar, articles printed in different newspapers.

3. For example, Senator Mark Arbib in his 2011 speech mentions China, the United States, Russia and Germany in this context.

4. Australian Telecommunications company Telstra had created Spectrum, a LGBTI-specific mentoring program for Telstra employees, and had developed new policies around a new inclusion and diversity agenda. It was also a foundation member of Pride in Diversity, Australia's first and only not-for-profit workplace program designed specifically to assist Australian employers with the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) employees.