2023 Rewind: Out Gold Medalist Matthew Mitcham Tried to Train the Gay Away

This piece is part of EDGE's 2023 Rewind series. We're reaching into our archives and sharing some of our favorite stories from the past year.

You can train to acquire new skills or in hopes of becoming a world-class athlete; but as out Olympic medalist Matthew Mitcham discovered the hard way, you can't train the gay away.

Mitcham made the horrifying revelation in a recent interview that as a boy he tried – and, unsurprisingly, failed – to do just that.

"Mitcham, 35, made the shock confession during his interrogation on SAS Australia by Anthony Middleton on Tuesday night's episode," reported UK newspaper the Daily Mail.

Mitcham's story was a heartbreakingly familiar one: He described knowing from an early age that he was gay, but also internalizing the shame and homophobia that the culture around him indoctrinated.

"I was the only child in a single parent household and obviously life was difficult" for his mother, the champion diver told Middleton, "so the easiest way to make me be as easy as possible was to control me through fear."

"I knew from five I liked boys. Through primary school and religion, shame started getting put onto it," Mitcham went on to add.

In his desperation, he turned to the discredited technique of aversion "therapy" to try to drive out his natural feelings by learning to associate them with pain. Mitcham recalled how he "put a rubber band around my wrist because I knew being gay was such a bad thing." Then, he said, "Every time I had a bad thought I would snap the rubber band against my wrist to try to associate pain with it to try to train myself out of being gay."

It's much the same as the theory behind so-called "conversion therapy," which holds that LGBTQ+ people can be "trained" or "converted" into cisgender heterosexuals. The problem with such so-called "therapy?" It doesn't work. Absolutely nothing about his natural sexuality changed as a result of Mitcham's attempts to train away the gay.

But his state of mind deteriorated.

"Mitcham added that his feelings of guilt culminated in him attempting to take his own life," the newspaper report said.

"When I got overwhelmed with feelings I got on the inside I used to cut myself," Mitcham told Middleton. "After one particular episode I went too far and I had to call my grandma to take my to hospital."

The reverberations continued even after Mitcham came out and dazzled the world with his Olympic triumph in 2008 in Beijing. Despite having embraced authenticity – and won a gold medal – the diving champ went into a drug-fueled tailspin in the years after the Beijing Olympics.

""In 2008, I won an Olympic gold medal with the highest scoring dive in Olympic history," Mitcham told Middleton, according to Australia's News 7.

"But after that I began a bit of a downward spiral," Mitcham continued. "I was using a lot of drugs, particularly crystal meth. But even though I'm an addict in recovery, I am still ruled by self doubt and fear."

The athlete eventually got clean in 2016.

"In January, Mitcham celebrated seven years of sobriety after his addiction to crystal meth and alcohol almost ended his career," the Daily Mail recalled.

Now happily married, Mitcham took to Instagram to share, "It has been seven years since I put anything stronger than a Panadol in my body, and I am without a shred of doubt the happiest and healthiest I have ever been."

Another milestone: In February, Mitcham announced that he and his husband, Luke Rutherford, had both joined OnlyFans. The motivation? "The money," Mitcham said in an interview. But also, Mitcham said, quoting a "Schitt's Creek" character, "'Take a thousand naked photographs of yourself while you're young and beautiful,' so I took 8,000 just to be safe."

His thirsty posts on Instagram reveal plenty without crossing into porn, and Mitcham indicated that he wasn't planning to put anything explicit on OnlyFans, either.

"I just like to show off my beautiful body," the athlete said, "which is very quickly becoming more of civilian body than an athlete body but people want to see it."