McClenaghan is a back-to-back world champion, so you probably shouldn’t have. Still, he had to hang around to the final hour for his routine across an exhaustive, day-long qualifier process, at the end of which only eight gymnasts would qualify for the Olympic final next Saturday.
He also had the uncomfortable experience of watching a series of rivals rack up impressive scores, and so knew there was no margin for error. But he knew than anyway.
The pommel horse is a brutally unforgiving discipline: 65 gymnasts compete to qualify for a final with only eight places up for grabs. There is only one chance to get it right: nobody gets any second chances. Getting back on the horse may be a good life philosophy but it’s not one by which the organisers live by.
Gymnastics is an absurdly complex sport to everyone but the obsessives, so as we all watched McClenaghan swoop, spin and swoon across the horse, we were all really awaiting for his own reaction at the end of it all. He dismounted, strode to his coach Luke Carson, and then they turned to face the cameras with a megawatt smile, his teeth as white as the chalk on his hands.
Job done.
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The judges confirmed so: 15.200, the joint-best score of the day, tying American Stephen Nedoroscik. McClenaghan scored slightly better on execution, Nedoroscik edged it on difficulty. Both will change up their routines for the final.
“Solid, that was the word Luke was using when I came off”, said McClenaghan after his routine. “That was solid, calm. That’s what you want to be like in that reappearance in the Olympic Games.”
McClenaghan infamously came off the horse in the Olympic final in Tokyo, and was suddenly recast in the role of medal favourite settling for seventh place. That day was an insight for the rest of us into the scary caprice of his sport: a single finger out of place at any moment, and it all goes ka-put.
The pommels on the horse that must bear the gymnast are each just 12cm in size, but the imagery is appropriate, because the Olympic gymnast balances their whole world on a pin.
And so it takes terrifyingly little to knock it off its axis.
The pommel horse is a parable in how frightening it can be to have control, and to have power. If things go wrong, there is nobody else out there to blame. And for McClenaghan, there is no opponent out there who can perform so well that it makes his success impossible.
He knows that if he performs the routine he knows he can perform, he will win an Olympic medal, and it will probably be gold. But consider the flipside to that: if he doesn’t win an Olympic medal, it will be because he hasn’t performed, because he has failed. But he has a routine to deal with the abnormal pressure.
McClenaghan doesn’t watch the gymnast immediately before him: instead he turns his back, closes his eyes, and visualises his routine. This, he says, blurs the sense of occasion and thus the pressure. It’s a reminder to him that this is just another training session. This is all his means of charting the path to the apparatus. Once he slaps his hands onto the pommels, McClenaghan says he is in his “happy place”, as he is not thinking about anything else. The pommels are his portals back to familiarity.
Rhys in full flight. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
McClenaghan defrays the Olympic pressure is by making it no different to his daily pressure.
“Every single day I go into training”, he said after his round, “I am treating it like a competition and it’s draining, as every day I am nervous. I am putting pressure on myself to perform a routine even though it’s just in front of my coach in an empty gym.
“It felt so familiar out there, that pressure I had on my shoulders, because I do it every day in training.”
But you get the sense that he isn’t heaping this kind of pressure upon himself every day just for an Olympic medal. No, he is chasing a perfection he readily admits is unattainable.
“Of course I want to keep pushing more and more to that perfection that isn’t attainable, really. But we’ll try.
“The perfect 10 is not attainable any more in gymnastics. The judges will always find something. But I want to have them guessing as much as possible.”
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Rhys McClenaghan keeps his nerve to return to the Olympic final, but did you ever really doubt him?
AND SO RHYS McClenaghan kept his nerve.
Did you ever doubt him?
McClenaghan is a back-to-back world champion, so you probably shouldn’t have. Still, he had to hang around to the final hour for his routine across an exhaustive, day-long qualifier process, at the end of which only eight gymnasts would qualify for the Olympic final next Saturday.
He also had the uncomfortable experience of watching a series of rivals rack up impressive scores, and so knew there was no margin for error. But he knew than anyway.
The pommel horse is a brutally unforgiving discipline: 65 gymnasts compete to qualify for a final with only eight places up for grabs. There is only one chance to get it right: nobody gets any second chances. Getting back on the horse may be a good life philosophy but it’s not one by which the organisers live by.
Gymnastics is an absurdly complex sport to everyone but the obsessives, so as we all watched McClenaghan swoop, spin and swoon across the horse, we were all really awaiting for his own reaction at the end of it all. He dismounted, strode to his coach Luke Carson, and then they turned to face the cameras with a megawatt smile, his teeth as white as the chalk on his hands.
Job done.
The judges confirmed so: 15.200, the joint-best score of the day, tying American Stephen Nedoroscik. McClenaghan scored slightly better on execution, Nedoroscik edged it on difficulty. Both will change up their routines for the final.
“Solid, that was the word Luke was using when I came off”, said McClenaghan after his routine. “That was solid, calm. That’s what you want to be like in that reappearance in the Olympic Games.”
McClenaghan infamously came off the horse in the Olympic final in Tokyo, and was suddenly recast in the role of medal favourite settling for seventh place. That day was an insight for the rest of us into the scary caprice of his sport: a single finger out of place at any moment, and it all goes ka-put.
The pommels on the horse that must bear the gymnast are each just 12cm in size, but the imagery is appropriate, because the Olympic gymnast balances their whole world on a pin.
And so it takes terrifyingly little to knock it off its axis.
The pommel horse is a parable in how frightening it can be to have control, and to have power. If things go wrong, there is nobody else out there to blame. And for McClenaghan, there is no opponent out there who can perform so well that it makes his success impossible.
He knows that if he performs the routine he knows he can perform, he will win an Olympic medal, and it will probably be gold. But consider the flipside to that: if he doesn’t win an Olympic medal, it will be because he hasn’t performed, because he has failed. But he has a routine to deal with the abnormal pressure.
McClenaghan doesn’t watch the gymnast immediately before him: instead he turns his back, closes his eyes, and visualises his routine. This, he says, blurs the sense of occasion and thus the pressure. It’s a reminder to him that this is just another training session. This is all his means of charting the path to the apparatus. Once he slaps his hands onto the pommels, McClenaghan says he is in his “happy place”, as he is not thinking about anything else. The pommels are his portals back to familiarity.
McClenaghan defrays the Olympic pressure is by making it no different to his daily pressure.
“Every single day I go into training”, he said after his round, “I am treating it like a competition and it’s draining, as every day I am nervous. I am putting pressure on myself to perform a routine even though it’s just in front of my coach in an empty gym.
“It felt so familiar out there, that pressure I had on my shoulders, because I do it every day in training.”
But you get the sense that he isn’t heaping this kind of pressure upon himself every day just for an Olympic medal. No, he is chasing a perfection he readily admits is unattainable.
“Of course I want to keep pushing more and more to that perfection that isn’t attainable, really. But we’ll try.
“The perfect 10 is not attainable any more in gymnastics. The judges will always find something. But I want to have them guessing as much as possible.”
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2024 Olympics Back on the Horse Paris 2024 Rhys McClenaghan