I once read a long fantasy story about a teenager who was a diver – it was a what-if for the author and his youth. The protagonist was good enough to make it to the ’68 Olympic Games in Mexico City. He witnesses Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their clenched fists and lowering their heads in support of the US civil rights movement (the IOC banned them for life – an Australian, Peter Norman, who wore an ‘Olympics Project for Human Rights’ badge during the ceremony in support was left off the Aussie Olympic team in ’72 and was not invited to join other Olympic medalists at the Sydney Olympic opening ceremony). The protagonist was written as being at least somewhat Openly Gay (I read the story online on another site about 15 years ago), but he never meets Dr Tom Waddell (Tom would later found the Gay Olympics, be sued by the USOC and forced to change the name to the Gay Games) who was participating in the same Olympics. When I emailed the author to ask why they never encountered each other in the story, the author admitted that he’d never heard of Waddell before.
The author is a closeted man who I think I remember telling me was in an opposite-sex marriage. Writing was his only outlet for his real feelings and desires. The story had reached significantly more than 100 chapters the last time I noticed it, but I had stopped reading it long before that point.
A little research should have uncovered that tidbit of history.