Канадалық жүзушінің өмірі мен қызметі

Canadian swimmer

After retirement, Tewksbury received a number of high profile endorsement deals and worked as an athlete representative with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), a position from which he resigned in disenchantment in 1998, accusing the IOC of rampant corruption. He was also part of the group of former Olympic athletes that was pushing for the resignation of IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch. Only months after the scandal surrounding the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic winter Games broke, Tewksbury became prominent around the world as a critic of the IOC and demanded reforms to the system. In 1993, Tewksbury and Mark Leduc both gave interviews about their homosexuality to the CBC Radio series The Inside Track for "The Last Closet", a special episode about homophobia in sports; however, as neither was ready to fully come out at the time, both interviews were given anonymously and recorded through voice filters. In December 1998, Tewksbury officially came out as gay; he subsequently lost a six figure contract as a motivational speaker because he was "too openly gay." Tewksbury was also highly critical of Swimming Canada's organization in the wake of the national team's poor performance at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, where they failed to medal. He suggested that there was a lack of accountability within Swim Canada, and that head coach Dave Johnson was given too much power. Tewksbury became a prominent advocate for gay rights and gay causes in Canada and the world. On May 16, 2003, Tewksbury joined the board of directors for the 2006 World Outgames in Montreal and was named co president. He was a panelist at the 2003 National Gay and Lesbian Athletics Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a panel of LGBT Olympians that also included rower Harriet Metcalf and high jumper Brian Marshall. Tewksbury was the narrator for the TV show How It's Made during the first season. In 2006, he published his second book, an autobiography entitled Inside Out: Straight Talk from a Gay Jock. In 2015, Tewksbury was presented the Bonham Centre Award from The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto, for his contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification. On July 23, 2015, Tewksbury presented his gold medal to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg for an exhibit promoting the power of sport to influence positive change. In 2017, Tewksbury was chosen as a Grand Marshal for the Fierté Canada Pride Montreal. In May 2019, Tewksbury performed an autobiographical one man show called Belong, which was produced by Wordfest and staged at the DJD Dance Centre in Calgary. The performance was a spin off of his 2018 staged reading called 50 & Counting at Buddies in Bad Times theatre in Toronto. Belong was then restaged in January 2020 as part of One Yellow Rabbit theatre’s 34th annual High Performance Rodeo in Calgary. In 2020, he became a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2022, he appeared as a panelist in Canada Reads, advocating for Esi Edugyan's novel Washington Black.