Join me in a splashy round of Paula Abdul seal claps to congratulate OSOTD Matthew Mitcham, who single-handedly thwarted China’s much-publicized chance at a diving sweep! Running on a precise power hybrid of solid, focused dives and OVERWHELMING ADORABLENESS, the 20-year-old Aussie struck gold in the men’s 10-meter platform finals, tossing goofy "looks like I’m actually in the running, mate!" mugs to the camera all the way. Mitcham, a former world double mini trampoline champion at 15, is the first Australian to declare his homosexuality before going to the Olympics. Cheers queers!
Other studly beasts from Saturday’s telecast: Sanya Richards made up for a disappointing solo race to anchor the U.S. women’s gold-medal 4×400 relay — and the U.S. men won, too, setting a new Olympic record. U.S. Women’s Basketball trounced Australia in a gold-medal game made most memorable by the Australians’ unforgiveable spandex uniforms. Canadian rower and extremely hot man Adam van Koeverden won silver in the K-1 500, after a crushing eighth-place finish in Friday’s 1000 that had him profusely apologizing to viewers ("I was a spectator," he said). Oh, and speaking of sitting on your ass in total disbelief, I watched synchronized swimmers and rhythmic gymnasts for hours — a fun quatra-annual Saturday tradition involving my utter shock that a select group of physiologically advanced humans actually can and do…do that. You know? Why? How? Wow.
I now feel compelled to create an evidential collage of Matthew Mitcham’s cuteness — not our standard operating procedure, but what the hell, it’s the weekend and here I am.
Well, that was fun and time-consuming. Co-endorse Mitcham, or nominate your own Olympic Stud of the Day, below!
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Mitcham is adorable. It’s unfortunate that NBC edited out his boyfriend from the coverage: http://thinkprogress.org/2008/08/24/mitcham-olympics/ .
You WIN for creating the adorableness montage! I was doing laundry while watching and everytime I would leave the room I made sure to pause the DVR on his mugging face!
Yay Matt! I was hoping that he would go running into the crowd and hug his partner Lachlan, but alas, American networks would never show that even if it did happen.
Watch’s NBC.com’s medal ceremony. He climb the rails to kiss his mom (I think), gave her his rose bouquet, and then sought out a guy (his partner, I think) and then gave him a very audible kiss!
Mitcham is only 20?! I was definitely rooting for him. A Chinese sweep would’ve been awesome for them, but seriously ridiculous. I did feel bad for their swimmer that completely blew it.
I didn’t have my contacts in this morning, so I didn’t know if I was seeing things when looking at those unis the Australian basketball team was wearing. What the frak were those?!
Aww, that montage truly shows his “OVERWHELMING ADORABLENESS”. Stupid NBC showed barely any of his reaction (they covered it with the final scores!) and didn’t show his medal ceremony! They were also too busy hyping up the Chinese diver (who can blame them really…) to mention Matt except for a quick sentence about how he quit diving 2 years ago. GAH. Just because he doesn’t want his sexuality to distract from his diving doesn’t mean you can’t MENTION it…
Still, his utter “AWWW”ness makes up for all the NBC boo boos.
Yay for Matt!!! he’s gorgeous and that last dive was truly extraordinary.
and as for the hideous australian basketball uniforms, they’ve been around for a while, and all the players hate them. apparently they’re getting new ones after the olympics but haven’t yet so as to keep same as the uniform they wore to win the world champs hoping for luck and maybe to scare the other teams. didn’t seem to work in the final though so hopefully they’ll never be seen again!
Right on! Good on you Matthew…and Annie!
waaahhh!! the one time i didn’t watch the diving finals and someone scores an almost perfect score… and it’s from matt!! does anyone know where i can watch his performance? i’m outside the USA so NBC’s website is of no help to me…
good on you matthew for showing off you mum and partner who have been behind you at these olympics….
Wow….I live in Hong Kong and the feed we saw here showed Matt after almost every dive…and AWESOME ADORABLENESS sums it up! Lovely spontaneous smiles. When he surfaced after his second dive he had SUCH a beautiful smile on his face, knowing he’d done it well. And in the medal ceremony, he hugged the two others on the podium (to the discomfort of the Chinese diver), but it was a great show of sportsmanship. He is the cutest athlete of the decade!
Mitcham is adorable and so good at diving! A lot of times he made no more splash than the smaller divers. I had no idea that diving was so popular with the gays, but it seemed like there were quite a few of our boys out there.
Isn’t he just GORGEOUS!!!! You can watch most of the coverage athttp://au.sports.yahoo.com/olympics/sports/diving
You may have to search the ‘news’ section of this site for the closing ceremony video.
I am from Sydney and also tried NBC by entering 90210 as “my” zip cod…haha…no luck!!
The Australian Ch. 7 website above should be accessible without an Aussie IP address xx
Matt is such a sweet, beautiful, humble, funny and charismatic boy….and very deserving of this article…Olympic Stud…that indeed HE IS!!!
I ended up having to download a Firefox plug in and watch on the NBC website, as the Aussie one said I wasn’t authorized, but it was worth it. He did some great dives (especially the last one), and he was so adorable! Also, the earlier poster was right and NBC did show him kiss a guy (his partner?) at the end of their medal ceremony coverage. Yay for him, and he definitely deserves Olympic stud honors.
I didn’t catch much of his event (argh!), but I agree, I think his adorableness clinched it (at least from your gold-medal-worthy montage, Annie). And thanks for the AvK shout out–I know we Cdns have been nominating him since the beginning. And thanks also to EW for all your hard work spending so much time finding the OSOTDs for us! Enjoy the closing ceremony–I watched it on CBC this morning, and it was a great show.
I SAW IT LAST NITE. . .WOW WAS I JUMPING UP AND DOWN! HE NOT ONLY SINGLE HANDLY DERAIL THE CHINESE FROM SWEEPING THE DIVES BUT HE ALSO SCORED THE HIGHEST SCORE EVER FOR A DIVE IN OLYMPIC HISTORY! THE FACT THAT HE IS GAY AND IS OPEN ABOUT IT INSPIRES ME AND WILL INSPIRE ALL YOUNG GAY ATHLETES WHO FEEL THEY NEED TO STAY CLOSTED! ITS OKAY TO BE GAY. . .AWW THIS IS A MOMENT OF PRIDE FOR ALL AUSSIE’s AND THE GAY COMMUINTY!
I definitely second your Stud of the Day!! Matthew Mitcham is just the cutest thing ever. He just couldn’t believe that he got gold. And many kudos to him for having the courage to be out.
I 100% endorse Matthew as Stud of the Day! I watched him dive last night…I love when an athlete is super excited to win and he was. so adorable and a fabulous diver!
“Canadian rower and extremely hot man Adam van Koeverden won silver in the K-1 500,”
Oh Annie. As a Canuck, giddy that you mentioned Adam. But Matthew is beyond cute for words too.
Annie, I love your posts so much, you always throw in a silly extra image but they are usually links so I’m glad this awesome montage is visible on the page…his OVERWHELMING CUTENESS must have insisted on it. Love you and GO MATT MITCHAM and all gay Olympians!!!
Adorable yes, talented yes, with an awesome bod, YES.
My gaydar went off through the diving finals so much, I had to drink several glasses of ice-cold water. Thanks to him for representing.
Matthew is so cute, and one hell of a diver. I love the two-handed wave! So adorable!
Adam van Koeverden is so worthy of OSOTD! He’s a class act all the way….Canada is so proud of him! Yay for Annie to recognize other countries studs. Great job
Completely agree with Mitchum as OSOTD. He was terrific and consistent and just plain fun to watch.
That was the perfect choice. When he started crying last night, I teared up too. It is so exciting to see true emotion from the athletes. Many congratulations Matt!
This guy is adorable but Reid Priddy from the Gold medal winning US men’s indoor volleyball team has to be there also. Amazing verticals, crushing kills and super hot bald head!
I nominate Matthew Mitcham as Olympic Stud of the Games — Michael Phelps is so last week. But Matthew came from behind, thwarted China’s sweep of the diving medals, and posted the highest score of any diver in Olympic history. Now that’s an Olympic Stud for the Ages!
You can see videos of matt at :
http://au.sports.yahoo.com/olympics/video/-/sports/diving/
Thanks for these Olympic posts, EW! It was fun. Matthew Mitcham was tremendous. I, too, got sucked into rhythmic gymnastics yesterday and watched in awe. What they did with the ribbons – it didn’t look real.