LUKE Carson was lost in a daze as he paced the corridors around the basement of the Bercy Arena.
Three floors up, slack-jawed spectators were still in deep discussion about the highest quality pommel horse final of all time – and the fact that Ireland’s Rhys McClenaghan, courtesy of a breathtaking routine, had finished top of the pile.
Over on the other side of the same bottom floor, the new Olympic champion was just about to walk into the press conference room and take his place between American Stephen Nedoroscik (silver) and Kazakhstan’s Nariman Kurbanov (bronze).
Coach Carson, with McClenaghan since the very beginning, shook his head and wandered. He didn’t look at his phone, he wasn’t talking to anybody else. For those moments it was just him, alone with his thoughts, trying to make sense of how the most crazy, ambitious of dreams sold 10 years earlier had somehow been realised.
“What I kept thinking last night, going to sleep, is that this has been such a personal journey.
“Like, everything that we’ve done from the very moment that me and Rhys linked up to this moment, I wrote down in 2014, and within it was every major title.
“I showed him, I showed his parents and I told him, and what I needed to do was to make them believe that it could happen. Because if I couldn’t get them on board, it just wasn’t possible… otherwise it’s just this crazy guy saying things.
“But I saw a spark in him so young and I believed it - I truly, honestly believed it. And there was such a vulnerability in believing something that much because it’s not guaranteed, obviously. Anything can happen, the margins of error are so small.
“But I truly, honestly believed with every fibre in my body, to the point where I visualised this so many times, it is like a dream I’ve had 30,000 times already, that it just felt like a jigsaw piece.
“It just went together perfectly.”
For a 15-year-old to shun the typical trappings of teenage life, in exchange for a one in a million shot at pulling off something remarkable, requires a leap of faith beyond all comprehension.
But McClenaghan and Carson are, and always have been, so much more than gymnast and coach.
“It’s hard to make it seem realistic back then but we saw a path – Luke clearly saw a path,” said McClenaghan.
“It’s not often I’ve heard him say ‘I think this kid can be a world champion’, but he said it for me… I owe Luke a lot. This is our medal and I’m proud it’s that way.”
From July 15, the day they swapped Ireland for Paris, Carson was convinced that what unfolded on Saturday evening was already written. He had seen it day in, day out in training, far from crowded arenas and media glare.
But Tokyo was always there too. Because, coming into those Olympic Games three years ago, McClenaghan is in even more electrifying form on the pommel. His success rate was 100 per cent.
“That’s unheard of,” said Carson, “he was absolutely on fire.”
And then, inside 10 seconds, it was over. The click of fingers, just like, what was supposed to be a dream turned into a nightmare.
Managing the pressure of the situation, controlling only what affected him, those were the key factors in laying those demons to rest on Saturday.
“That’s the maturity of him as an athlete… Tokyo taught him that. Tokyo taught him a hard lesson.
“You know, to be perfectly honest, Tokyo, from both of our point of views, was really traumatic. Like, I felt like a part of my soul died that day.
“But unfortunately, sometimes you need to make those mistakes of being almost intimidated by the big scores that have come out, and then the psychology switches slightly, then it’s not just about me and my routine, it’s ‘I’ve got to beat this subjective score, it’s out of my control’.
“And so from Tokyo to now has been an open, honest discussion that we can’t control scores; it’s completely out of our control, there’s zero point in worrying about it or thinking about it. What you can control is your gymnastics and how you frame it.
“So what I said to him yesterday during line up was today would be a battle of the wits. All the endurance is done, all the hard work is done, but today is the battle of the wits.
“You have to be able to block all that out because none of it matters. And he did that today. What he did today is what he’s done in every day in training for the last year, and I promise you I’m not joking.
“He has treated every session like it was an Olympic Games final, and the point of that is that when it comes to the Olympic Games final that it’s just another training session.
“He knew that and that’s something that he’s really mastered, and that’s why he is now an Olympic champion.”
