Life’s Work: An Interview with Greg Louganis; Harvard Business Review, July-August 2016

Alison Beard, Harvard Business Review; Life’s Work: An Interview with Greg Louganis:

"After the Olympics, you signed very few endorsement deals. Wheaties didn’t put you on the box as part of its Legends series until this year. What did companies tell you or your spokespeople at the time?

I got a few local things but nothing big. A reporter in Chicago contacted Wheaties back in the 1980s to ask why I hadn’t been on a box, and the response to him at the time was “We didn’t feel that he fulfilled our demographics,” which was basically a nice way of saying, “It’s rumored that he’s gay.” That was kind of the mentality. But you never know. In ’84 there were so many incredible stories: Edwin Moses, Evelyn Ashford, Carl Lewis, Nancy Hogshead, Rowdy Gaines—all Olympic gold medalists. But the advertising world just totally rallied around Mary Lou Retton. And it was great for her. It’s not like we’re in competition with each other with this kind of stuff. You just never know who’s going to strike a chord.

How do you feel now that you have your Wheaties box?

It’s more meaningful now than it would have been in my heyday, because I’m being embraced as a whole person. I’m 56, a gay man, living with HIV, happily married. Who would have imagined that back in the 1980s? I also did some research and found that General Mills is ranked very high in terms of human rights: They have a diversity foundation, and they do a lot for the LGBT community. So the times have changed. We’ve just come so far."