I concur with your recent ...
Matthew Mitcham, Australian gold medalist for diving
Question: I concur with your recent Dispatches on the 2008 Olympics and how dazzling the 16 days in Beijing have been. However, NBC's final broadcast of events last Saturday ended my viewing on a disappointed note, due to what seemed like homophobia during their coverage of the men's platform diving final (of all places). As the event played out, Australia's Matthew Mitcham had a stunning come-from-behind effort to steal the gold away from China's Zhou Luxin with the highest-scoring dive in Olympic history. It was breathtaking. And yet, during the entire event, the NBC commentators failed to mention a single substantive thing about Mitcham's personal life (unlike most other athletes who were contenders for gold), and I can't help but think it was due to the fact that Mitcham was the only openly gay male athlete at the games. It's not as though his sexuality is an obscure fact. Since coming out, he's been discussed in papers like the
Los Angeles Times. He's been on the cover of magazines. And Perez Hilton blogged about Mitcham on his Web site, which, if nothing else, speaks of Mitcham's relevance in our gossipy zeitgeist. NBC's commentators had a wealth of information about divers, and in their constant banter, they frequently discussed the details of the dating and family lives of divers from other countries. Would it have killed NBC to show Mitcham the same respect by pointing out that his partner, Lachlan, was in the crowd and rooting him on? I find it strange that the same network conglomerate thinks our culture can handle
Queer Eye, but somehow shies away from acknowledging something as innocuous and heartwarming as this. It was a simple moment that could have humanized gay relationships to a country that so often fails to grasp at anything but stereotypes. What would be so risky about it? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Answer: I felt much the same on Saturday night. Having shielded myself from the results, I was stunned and thrilled at Matthew Mitcham's surprise gold-medal win, a huge newsmaker in that he was the only diver who was able to thwart China's 8-for-8 gold-medal goal. It was an incredible story and seriously underplayed by NBC, which cut away from the event way too quickly. No interview, not a glimpse of the medal ceremony. If all you knew was what NBC let on, you might have pieced together that Mitcham had left the sport for a while for "personal issues" and was a former trampolinist. Nothing about his personal life, the fact he had loved ones (including his mother) in the stands or that he was headline news back home. While some might argue that it was more about NBC's typical USA parochialism than homophobia in not giving Mitcham a bigger spotlight, there's no avoiding the fact that NBC Sports was ridiculously, cowardishly squeamish about addressing Mitcham's personal story with as much honesty as the diver himself has done. In a cover interview with
The Advocate magazine, he said, "I just want to be known as the Australian diver who did really well at the Olympics. It's everybody else who thinks it's special when homosexuality and elite sport go together." The point being that NBC didn't need to sensationalize or sentimentalize Mitcham's story, just report it honestly as the human-interest, feel-good story that it was, not to mention one of the great underdog upsets of the games. Maybe a network with real guts like HBO can do this athlete justice, perhaps in a profile on the
True Sports series or on Bob Costas's own HBO show. NBC really blew this one. For what it's worth, NBC's Olympics president has
offered an apology to to any offended parties via the afterelton.com Web site.
