Australia’s Matthew Mitcham, who won Olympic gold in Beijing, has retired.
NBC Sports reports this week that Mitcham has announced his retirement. He had fallen off some, performance-wise, since those 2008 Olympics. At the 2012 Olympics in London, he took 13th, making it to the semifinals but falling short of the medal final.
He also missed the qualification for the 2015 World Championships.
Mitcham won gold on the 10-meter platform in Beijing, becoming the only non-Chinese diver to win gold at the 2008 Olympics. He did so in dramatic fashion, putting up the highest-scoring single dive in the history of the Olympics to pass up China’s Zhou Luxin on the very last dive.
NBC Sports reports that Mitcham recalled that Olympic gold, his synchro diving win at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and his #1 world ranking in 2010 as some of the highlights of his career.
“I have achieved everything I hoped for, including the big three — Olympic Gold in 2008, world No. 1 in 2010, and Commonwealth Gold in 2014 — which could never have happened without all the help I’ve had along the way,” he says in the NBC Sports piece.
Mitcham was the first Australian male diver to win Olympic gold in over 80 years. He now retires at the age of 27.
Chantal Newberry won gold in the w 10 mtr platform in Athens which makes her the first .
Matt is a good bloke but he followed Chantal’s groundbreaking work in a judged sport where few broke in .(She also won Australia’s first World Championship medal in the 3m in 1999).
And the Olympic bronze & silver medals of Loudy Tourky . Seeing Loudy , an Israeli born Palestininian , famed Australian TV critic Clive James remarked …Thank God we got Loudy & not Yasser Arafat .