Rhys McClenaghan said it was a "dream well-earned" as he won an Olympic gold medal in the Men's pommel horse final, with a score of 15.533.
The Co Down gymnast has won Team Ireland’s sixth medal at these Paris Olympic Games.
Rowers Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy struck gold on Friday, and their teammates Philip Doyle and Daire Lynch won bronze on Thursday.
In the pool Mona McSharry claimed bronze and Daniel Wiffen gold, and Kellie Harrington has secured at least a bronze. Notably it is Ireland’s third gold medal of these Paris Olympic Games.
In becoming Olympic champion, twenty-five-year-old McClenaghan writes himself into the history books yet again by becoming the first Irish gymnast ever to win an Olympic medal.
McClenaghan, who has been coached to success throughout by Luke Carson, has had a spectacular career littered with a series of ground breaking firsts; he was the first Irish gymnast to win a medal at a world championship (2019 bronze), first to make Olympic final (Tokyo 2020), first to win world (2022) and European (2023) championship titles, and then to retain them (2023 Worlds, 2024 Europeans), so it is fitting he will forever go down in history as the first Irish gymnast ever to win an Olympic medal.
Speaking afterwards, a beaming McClenaghan reflected on the enormity of the achievement:
“It feels like a dream, it’s a dream well-earned and I just can’t believe it’s happened! It always felt like it was going to happen but I wasn’t sure when.
“Listen everybody at home see this as an example of find a dream that you love, chase it and enjoy that journey because I can tell you if I fell off that Pommel today I still would have loved this journey, every single second of it but I didn’t and today I’m walking away with an Olympic gold medal!”
“After the routine I was happy – I wasn’t thinking about medals. When the score came up I was proud of that score because it was mine and I wasn’t thinking of the podium at all I was just thinking I’ve done my job and I feel like that’s where the main emotions came from today.”
"I knew that this would also be the toughest Pommel Horse final of all time, and it was so to come out on top is incredible.”
The first man up, Kazakhstan’s Nariman Kurbanov, really threw down the gauntlet with a huge score of 15:433 but then the defending champion, Britain’s Max Whitlock, had a shakey routine by his standards, scoring 15:200.
Loran de Munck of the Netherlands, came off the horse, scoring only 13:733 to put him out of medal contention.
McClenaghan performed the routine of a lifetime, scoring 15:333 with a huge difficulty score of 6.600 and a typically brilliant execution score of 8.933.
That performance put him in the lead but next up was America’s 2021 world champion Stephen Nedoroscik, regarded as a big threat, but he scored 15:300, leaving the Newtownards star in the lead with three to go.
None of the remaining three men scored over 15, which meant that the vaunted title of ‘Olympic Champion’ went to McClenaghan in one of the most incredible achievements in Irish sport. Kurbanov of Kazakhstan took silver with a score of 15.433, with Nedoroscik of the USA taking bronze in 15.300, and Tokyo champion Max Whitlock pushed down to fourth.
