with BBC Sport, Matthew Mitcham, 32, opens up about the long road to accepting himself as a gay man, and the awful toll it took on his performance and his body.
As he began to realize his attraction to men as a teenager, Mitcham tried desperately to deny his feelings.“I was so scared of it that I would actually tie a rubber band around my wrist and every time I had a gay thought I would snap it, to try and associate pain and suffering with the gay thought.
To try and train myself out of being gay,” said the diver who won gold at the 2008 Bejing Olympics. “I felt stuck not being able to be authentically me.