Rhys McClenaghan to chase medals on two fronts in Los Angeles in 2028

TO CHASE GOLD IN LA: Men's Pommel Horse Final Gold Medalist Rhys McClenaghan pictured this morning at the Pantheon in Paris with his Gold medal. Picture: ©INPHO/Morgan Treacy

Rhys McClenaghan hadn’t left the Bercy Arena on Saturday night when his thoughts kicked on towards the next Olympic Games in 2028.

“LA, baby,” he laughed.

The new Pommel Horse gold medallist is still only 25, and will certainly be aiming to defend his title in California in four year’s time. But there’s more planned too. The Newtownards man is leaning towards expanding his footprint.

The Floor may well be part of his schedule in Los Angeles, maybe the All-Around, which encompassed the Vault, Bars, Beam and Floor, with it. It's a hugely exciting prospect.

“Yeah doing Floor, doing All-Around – all six of the events in gymnastics – I want to do that almost for fun, I enjoy it. I’m glad I’ve accomplished this in Pommel Horse now and I can switch my focus a little bit to the other events and possibly help out a gymnastics team in Ireland and contribute in as many ways as possible."

Floor is his second strongest event as it stands and it goes without saying that a world-class athlete like McClenaghan would not be trying his hand at something new (in competition terms) if there was not a reasonable expectation of return.

Would a medal in Floor be the aim?

“Yeah, if I’m going to be competing in apparatus I want it to be medal-worthy. So, floor definitely has that possibility, but there’s a lot of work to be done on it so hopefully I can start that soon.” 

McClenaghan’s mum Tracy joked on Saturday that gymnastics is the toughest sport, and that Pommel is the toughest part of the toughest sport, and the man himself was exacting of his own efforts even after scoring a sensational 15.333 with the judges.

Now? He’s looked back on it since and in a kinder light.

“I have, yeah. It looked better than it felt. I felt like there was a couple of areas where I was a little bit off balance and I had to adjust a little bit, but when I watched the routine back I disguised those little off-balance moments very well.

“I kept my tight body, kept my legs together and kept my focus throughout the routine. I think the score was definitely right for me, it was a personal best performance for me as well as a personal best score.” 

The comparisons with the Tokyo 2020 final, when he slipped and finished seventh have been thick on the ground but its worth pointing out that the routine he selected at the Bercy Arena was a 6.4 difficulty compared to the 6.2 in Japan.

He has progressed in so many ways as an athlete.

It hasn’t come easy. McClenaghan followed Tokyo with what he felt was a disappointing Commonwealth silver medal in Birmingham and then a failure to make the European Championship final in Munich, both in 2022.

Months later and he had won his first World Championship title, and he detailed then how he had been forced to strip back a routine that just wasn’t working for him. But he couldn’t have won this weekend without returning to the routine that had caused him such strife.

“So the routine I went back to, the structure is the same, but pretty much the skill that was giving me issues before that World Championships had to go back into the routine if we were going to bump the difficulty up even more.

“So I performed the highest difficulty I’ve ever performed in that routine yesterday and it’s what won me that title,” he explained. “You’ve just got to risk it for that top spot. That’s how high the standard was.”