On our arrival Rhys McClenaghan is doing some gentle stretching on the floor of the National Gymnastics training centre. His season is done, he’s looking forward to going home and “being human” for a week or two, before the long and lonely routine begins all over again.
He follows us upstairs, where McClenaghan takes a seat and places his World Championship gold medal on the table in front of him. Dressed in a black T-shirt he appears surprisingly slight, 23 now and unfailingly boyish, his already considerable achievements resting easy on his still young shoulders.
This is his place of work, has been since 2018, when as a teenager McClenaghan moved down from his home in Newtownards to make full use of this suitably world-class facility, viewed below now through the interior windows, at the north end of the Sport Ireland Campus at Abbotstown,
It’s here, day after day, week and after week, he’s been honing that immeasurable core and upper-body strength and skill sets required for his most testing of sporting disciplines, the pommel horse. One small mistake, on any given day of competition, there is no reward.
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After a few reminders of that earlier in the season, McClenaghan found the perfect reward at a packed Bank Arena in Liverpool last Saturday afternoon, winning a first global medal for Ireland with a magnificent performance at the 2022 World Championships.
“It’s just been a long year,” he reflects now. “There’s not even really a gymnastics competition season, like in athletics, where there’s an indoor and outdoor season.
“We don’t have that luxury. It’s just when the competition is, you train for that, so a lot of travelling, a lot of competitions. Then we had to keep that fitness until the Commonwealth Games, then after Commonwealth it was European Championships, and we had to maintain until the World Championships.
“But I haven’t felt better physically, I’ve had no big injuries this year, my body has been in top shape all year, which is amazing.”
He’ll get home later on Tuesday, for two weeks down time, “eating pizza when I want, having a drink,” he says. There’s no room for that during the season, when he keeps himself at 60kg “dead” all the time.
“I haven’t done those things. I haven’t touched alcohol in seven months now. It’s going to be nice just to socialise with friends, go home and spend time with family, all those things I couldn’t do when I was in full-time training.”
There are the sacrifices McClenaghan has long embraced. His gold medal win in Liverpool was his latest in a multitude of firsts: in 2016, a first ever gymnastics medal for Ireland at the European Junior Championships; then gold at the 2018 Commonwealth Games and European Senior Championships; then bronze at the 2019 World Championships.
At last year’s delayed Tokyo Olympics, he became the first Irish gymnast to make a final, qualifying as joint-second best. He finished up seventh, losing control of the handles after just 10 seconds, twice falling chest-first on to the horse.
I come down here every week, I don’t come in and do my office hours, I’m going home and looking at videos all evening and analysing my gymnastics.
“When I look back at the Olympics, it’s not a negative experience. I became an Olympian, the first Irish Olympic finalist for gymnastics, that’s why I was proud to get the tattoo.
“Of course there was the disappointment in the finals and, again, that just adds to this moment here, where I’m World champion. It wouldn’t be as exciting had I done this in that year of 2018. It makes it so much more special that the shoulder gave up on me in 2018, I had to get surgery, come back, Olympics didn’t go my way: the disappointments make this so much sweeter, and I’m grateful for that in a way.”
Indeed his World title has effectively been six years in the making, McClenaghan admitting he first sensed it was possible back in 2016, “when I placed on the podium behind Louis Smith and Max Whitlock, who were the two best in the world at the time.
“That kind of made me think, all right, I could take those guys on, even though I was only 16 at the time. My coach (Luke Carson) had that belief, my parents had that belief, and it’s rubbed off.”
Carson, the former British gymnast, has also made plenty of sacrifices, spending much of his week too, away from his wife and children in Belfast, sharing with McClenaghan the house owned by Gymnastics Ireland next to the Campus.
Pivotal to his win in Liverpool, his score of 15.300 the highest in any event this year, was their decision to revert to an older routine, the newer version letting him down slightly at the Commonwealth Games (where he still won silver) and then the European Championships (where he missed out on the final).
“For this year we were trying a new strategy with the routine, where we took out a couple of skills and replaced them with new skills. It didn’t necessarily change the difficulty, but it was hopefully going to improve the execution. But the skill I put in was just not working in competition, and quite frankly in training.
“Then after Europeans it was like, yeah, we need to leave that. It’s hard to make a decision like that because it feels like you’re going backwards, but I take my confidence in my preparations. Because that routine was going so well in training and I was so familiar with it, I had done it since 2018.
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“But I’m not landing on dismount thinking, gold medal! I’m thinking that’s the programme done, all the hard work has worked well, and it’s a testament to myself and my coach Luke that the programme has worked in this moment.”
He also works with Jessie Barr, performance psychologist at the Institute of Sport. He’s the only Irish gymnast on podium funding of €40,000 (with some personal sponsors too including actor James Nesbitt), still he admits it can feel like a lonely world at times.
“Yeah, it does, but it keeps the focus on my job. I come down here every week, I don’t come in and do my office hours, I’m going home and looking at videos all evening and analysing my gymnastics.
“It’s definitely a full-time job, but it’s part of the deal, my life is gymnastics. There are certainly sacrifices that come with it, but it is all for the greater good. I know that in the general public an Olympic medal is more valuable in a sense but there are people with Olympic medals have never had a World gold. It’s just as difficult, it’s everyone in the world competing for this medal, same as in the Olympics,
“But I also want that Olympic medal.”
