Paris 2024: ‘No, absolutely not’ – McClenaghan didn’t know if he had done enough

Rhys McClenaghan has told of the anxious seconds he spent waiting to find out whether his dream of an Olympic gold medal would still come true.

The Irish gymnast said his broad smile after dismounting from the pommel horse final on Saturday was a sign of relief “that I had done my job”.

But he admitted he could not be sure he had bettered the “monster score” of 15.433 set by the very first competitor in the final, Kazakh Nariman Kurbanov.

“No, absolutely not,” said the 25-year-old from Newtownards when he realised immediately after his routine that he had done enough.

“When we got 0.1 above 0.1, I suddenly realized that this might be the day I become an Olympic champion.”

The Northern Irishman had to wait for the remaining competitors to complete their programmes before his gold medal was confirmed.

McClenaghan admitted that not adding Olympic gold to his previous World, European and Commonwealth Games titles would have left “an empty void”, even though “I would still have been Ireland’s most successful gymnast ever and one of the best in the sport”.

“This whole Olympics has been a redemption, winning back-to-back world and European titles and finishing with the Olympic title,” the gold-winning gymnast said on BBC Northern Ireland’s Good Morning Ulster.

“That was the redemption era for Rhys McClenaghan. I’m so glad it’s finished.”

The gymnastics prodigy had made it clear for more than a decade that he had ambitions to win the Olympic title.

“I’ve been saying that since I was about 15 or 16.

“The fact that I said that to a lot of people at the time may have come across as arrogant, or too confident, like ‘what gives this man the right to say that?’ Now everyone realizes why I said that.”