The weight of his words are not lost on him. Gus Kenworthy opened up about inspiring others to come out of the closet and live their most authentic lives.
“I think I sometimes forget about it and then I’ll have an interaction with someone that will make me kind of remember and realize and it’s like the one thing that makes me the most proud out of anything I’ve ever done in my life, because it’s been able to help over people,” the 26-year-old Olympian previously gushed in an exclusive interview with Us Weekly. Kenworthy added that he’s looking forward to competing as his true self without any secrets about his identity. “I think I’ll just be less inhibited, less encumbered. I’ll be able to be myself and I think it just takes a weight off your shoulders. You feel more free, you have less distractions and I think you’re able to be in the moment more and perform better.”
The freestyle skier also dished on his relationship with boyfriend Matthew Wilkas. “I think most of all, I love his sense of humor,” Kenworthy said of the playwright. “We’re really boring. We go to the gym everyday, he goes to the gym with me. We go to dinner all the time. We love to see movies or go to a Broadway show. He’s been on Broadway, so he often knows a lot of the guys that are in the shows and it’s kind of cool to have an inside angle like that.
Kenworthy publicly came out in an interview with ESPN in October 2015. He and Wilkas, 39, started dating one month later after interacting on Instagram.
With Reporting by Carly Sloane
To learn more about Kenworthy, visit teamusa.org. The Olympics are currently airing on NBC.
