There is a website available in Paris for the exclusive use of accredited media and the army of team officials that support the athletes called MyInfo. In the biographies for the gymnasts, who compete in Saturday’s men’s pommel final, Rhys McClenaghan is asked about ambitions. His answer is one line.
“Landing on top of the podium at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.”
The answer could have been taken from Tokyo 2020. On Saturday night, in the Bercy Arena, McClenaghan is chasing an ambition that was alive three years ago and perished on one mistake in the final.
A missed hand position and fall pushed him down the field into seventh place. He left Tokyo chastened but also stoic and determined. The Olympic Games, the damned Olympics, had struck again.
Because of Covid it has been a three-year wait, not four, for the Olympic cycle to continue. McClenaghan has thrillingly pushed on and in 2022 became world champion in Liverpool. A year later he successfully defended his world title in Antwerp.
In October of that year he told The Irish Times: “Many athletes would agree it’s probably more difficult to retain a title than it is to get it in the first place. Because you’ve got a target on your back.”
Well, he didn’t win an Olympic medal in Tokyo but as a two-time World Champion coming into Paris, McClenaghan is the man to beat.
After confidently qualifying a week ago for the eight-man final, McClenaghan is ranked number one with his score of 15.200. He seems acutely aware of his place in the gymnastic firmament, conscious enough at least to state in public where he is in his own head about the prospects of fulfilling the ambition that failure in Tokyo has sharpened.
“I’m at the top of the mountain now, and I’m just enjoying the view,” the 25 year old said after qualifying for the final. “It could be better, but it was solid. That was the word Luke [Carson, his coach] was using when I came off. It was calm. That’s what you want to be like in that reappearance at the Olympic Games, and that’s what it did feel like.
“But of course, I want to be pushing more and more to that perfection that isn’t attainable. But we’ll try.”
Even after his impressive qualification at the top of a 65-strong field, McClenaghan and Carson had not decided what routine they would use in the final. Those in the know say the pommel closely relates to the balance beam in women’s gymnastics because there remains a fearful sense the athletes might not make it through to the end of the routine – as McClenaghan painfully demonstrated three years ago before he was 10 seconds in. Completion is the first rung on the ladder of success.
In essence it is about mental and physical agility, where muscle memory is key. It is also a truism of the sport that if the athlete tries to memorise the moves in sequence, he is toast before he vaults on to the pommel. It needs to be ingrained.
There is also the endurance, rhythm and precision required to not touch the apparatus as the legs “flare” from side to side over the 45 seconds or so. The scoring comes down to execution and difficulty with the athlete deciding before he competes on how far he wants to push the difficulty element of the routine.
It is a risk/reward settlement McClenaghan will agree with himself and his team as well as an expression of self-belief. To set the routine at a dizzy Olympic gold medal-winning level of difficulty is not within the ability of every athlete. For McClenaghan it is. Saturday’s final performance will not be the same as the one that got him to the Bercy Arena.
“It is different,” said McClenaghan last week on his planned final routine. “I can upgrade and I plan to upgrade. Hopefully we’ll be seeing that score bumped up even further. It felt so familiar out there, that pressure I have on my shoulders, because I do it every day in training. I don’t know what score it will take to win, and I don’t care, as I have my job to do and I am hopefully going to do it.”
It would be remiss to believe he has a straight run to the podium. In Tokyo the title went to an opponent he knows well, Great Britain’s Max Whitlock, a three-time Olympic champion, who has won the Olympic title once in the floor routine and twice on the pommel. In Tokyo Whitlock became the first man in more than 40 years to defend a pommel horse gold medal.
Reversing his decision to retire after Tokyo, he announced Paris would be his fourth and final Games. And Whitlock duly made his presence felt in qualifying as one of five athletes to score over 15 points.
McClenaghan knows his way around the game of margins as well as the personalities of Whitlock and the other top qualifiers, Japan’s Takaaki Sugino (15.033), Ukraine’s Oleg Verniaiev (15.033), Kazakhstan’s Nariman Kurbanov (15.000), Korea’s Woong Hur (14.900), and Dutch gymnast Loran de Munck (14.760).
He is where he has always wanted to be, from when he travelled to London 12 years ago to watch the pommel competition as a teenage fan. He told the BBC about how he deeply admired how British silver medal winner Louis Smith performed under the weight of his home crowd.
“I saw the amount of pressure that was on that man’s shoulders and to see him presenting to the judges and performing a routine like he always did in training, that for me was so admirable,” he told Nigel Ringland. “It’s a little moment that I’ll never forget, that inspired me until this point. My whole career is filled with moments like that, moments of surreal, dreamlike fantasies that I’ve had growing up, to be competing against Louis.”
On Saturday night, there are no fantasies. It’s just McClenaghan and the weight of the expectations he has heaped on himself. Already a two-time world champion and three-time European champion, he is regarded as one of the greats. But it is still not enough for McClenaghan. He will go into the Bercy Arena chasing perfection.
