Gay Olympic champ Matthew Mitcham on Russia: “It’s really sad, the way they are persecuting people”

I will forever respect and admire Australia’s Matthew Mitcham for being the only athlete competing in the 2008 Summer Olympics in China to have the guts to be openly gay.

The only one.

So it was sweet justice that this courageous young man went on to win the Gold Medal in the 10 meter platform.

Imagine if those Olympics had been held in Sochi, Russia where a recently enacted law criminalizes any kind of support, no matter how modest, of the LGBT community and includes a provision that allows the Russian government to arrest foreign tourists for up to 14 days for supporting LGBT equality.

There is concern over how athletes and spectators might be impacted.

“It’s really sad,” Mitcham tells The Daily Telegraph. “The way they are persecuting people in Russia is quite horrific.”

He adds: “The Olympics is the best experience you will ever have as an athlete. Their whole memory and experience is going to be marred by this stuff. They are going to be made to feel unacceptable, inappropriate, and it is a really awful, awful feeling.”

“The Olympics are supposed to be somewhere where they can go to be relieved of that feeling. A place where you can compete and feel that gender and sexuality is not an issue.”