Watch: Matthew Mitcham Opens Up about Addiction, Youthful Gay Shame, and 'The Other Diver' Getting All the Love

Australian athlete Matthew Mitcham made history when, at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, he became the first openly gay man to win a gold medal at the quadrennial games. But will that be his enduring legacy?

The 37-year-old Olympian – who is nine years sober and remains stunningly fit – joined OnlyFans in 2023. He also maintains one of the steamiest, albeit non-explicit, pages on Instagram.

It's a pragmatic move; as a world class athlete, he's earned a physique that people admire.

"I've invested a lot of time and effort in my body," Mitcham wrote in an op-ed last year. "If people want to see it, I'd be stupid to give it away for free."

His physique, Mitcham added, is "just like any project you've worked hard on, it's natural to be proud and want to show it to people."

Especially when, as he told host Jon Dean on the March 4 edition of the "All Out" podcast, he "fell into a pretty profound period of depression" during those years of developing his body, a period in which he "hated diving" but felt compelled to stick with it because he "saw diving as my ticket to being special."

Mitcham dove into his history of mental health challenges – and his current life woes – with Dean, opening up for a wide-ranging and deeply personal interview.

In the course of the conversation, Mitcham addressed how Tom Daley – another out Olympian with a gold medal to his credit – has all but eclipsed him in the years since 2008. The fact he was a gay man in a "non-mainstream sport" may (or may not) have hobbled his post-Olympics life, or perhaps the world was simply more accustomed to, and willing to hear about, gay athletes by the time Daley came onto the scene. In any case, "The public reaction and the brand support has been quite different" when it comes to Daley, Dean noted.

Comparing himself to Daley used to torment Mitcham, the athlete admitted. "How come that diver is still more popular and successful, and better looking, and gets all of the endorsements [deals] and gets all the adulation, and he's the poster boy for diving?" Mitcham wondered aloud in the course of the chat.

Not that he cited Daley by name when the topic first came up, referring to a nebulous "other one." "How come the other one's getting all the love and attention, and not me?"

"Are you talking about anyone specifically?" Dean asked.

"No," Mitcham said, unconvincingly, as the two broke out into laughter.

Daley – a successful entrepreneur as well as Olympic medalist several times over – has managed a higher profile than Mitcham, who attributed the different outcomes, at least in part, to Daley having been a "child prodigy" at the sport, as well as being handsome and "very marketable," in no small part thanks to a lack of "controversy." All of that has made Daley "safe commercially, because you know he's going to do well no matter what he does."

"And he's just a really lovely guy who people can get behind," Mitcham said, adding that he's concluded that he and Daley are "two different people with two different journeys..."

Still, it was tough for him to see Daley being cited as "the first openly gay [Olympic gold medallist] diver," and "just feeling like I was being erased from history. You know, the one thing I held onto that made me feel special."

He put that behind him too, however, when he began to consider those feelings another manifestation of "my mental illness... looking for reasons to make me feel worse."

Said Mitcham: "I just had to let all of that go."

"When I look at Tom as a person, he is lovely," Mitcham told Dean. "We are friends; he is a good father; he is a good representative of the gay community; he is an extremely successful athlete. So, I can't fault him as a person... and he's always been lovely to me."

The Olympian discussed his history of mental health challenges in a fair amount of detail, which he tied in part to the early shame of being a gay youth growing up in a religious environment, leading him to practice a "Pavlovian" self-punishment to try to make himself heterosexual. "It didn't work," he said, to Dean's utter lack of surprise. As his teen years progressed, Mitcham resorted to self-harm, then drinking, and eventually drugs.

There came a point when Mitcham chose to give those things up in pursuit of Olympic glory. He also came out, at age 18, to the world, having come out four years earlier to his family, sparking the newspaper headline "Gay and Going for Gold."

Mitcham was surprised to find himself getting support from a global community of fans when the news hit. But once he took the gold in 2008, the win "triggered a bit of a spiral for me," Mitcham said.

Even as a child, he said, he'd had a drive to become "the best in the world at something," which he hoped would help him to "feel whole.... make me feel right." But, the Olympian added, "it was a particularly devastating blow when I realized that... the gold medal didn't help with my self-esteem" since he started to feel that he didn't personally matter; "all people cared about was the gold medal."

Another blow: Unlike the experience of other Olympic champions, sponsorships and other lucrative deals failed to materialize for Mitcham. "It's not that anything should have been happening because that's very entitled," Mitcham said. Still, it was not what one might have expected, and Mitcham seemed at a loss as to the reason.

"I could say it's because the global financial crisis happened in 2008," Mitcham opined, adding that it would also be too "reductive" to attribute the lack of post-Olympic deals to his being openly gay. "It just didn't happen for me."

Even now, not everything is roses and sunshine for Mitcham.

Saying he was currently dealing with "life stuff" and "financial stuff," the athlete told Dean, "I'm going through the hardest year of my life, to be honest." Opening up more, he said, "I've been going through a divorce for the last six months, which has been really painful" – so much so, he said, that the pain of his current situation outstrips even what he went through as an addict or during his time as a gay youth struggling with his sexuality.

Mitcham spoke to his enduring commitment to sobriety, noting that "drugs and alcohol don't actually make anything better. They don't solve anything. You're just going to have the problem plus whatever new problem you created by using again to deal with."

The groundbreaking athlete remains a beacon of courage for others in need of an example of how queer people can navigate hard times – more so in this epoch of rising anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

Watch Matthew Mitcham's appearance on the "All Out" podcast below.