It’s just after 4pm on a Friday when Rhys McClenaghan kicks off his trainers. For some, this is when the weekend begins, but he is still taking care of business. And for as long as McClenaghan can remember, business has been his pursuit of an Olympic gold medal.
There’s a no-shoes policy inside the gymnastics hall at the Sport Ireland Indoor Arena, Dublin, and McClenaghan suggests sitting on one of the soft landing mats next to the parallel bars. Several young gymnasts are already warming up, laughing amid the tumbling, and McClenaghan glances around with a playful eye as if he’s still that giddy kid inside.
“Sometimes when the body is aching, you’re tired, maybe it’s not as much fun,” he says, as if acting up the tired part. “But it’s my job to come into this playground every day, swing about on a pommel horse and try to get better. I’d still take that any day of the week.”
The last time we met, inside the Arena Bercy in Paris, McClenaghan had an Olympic gold medal draped around his neck. His magnificent triumph on the pommel horse that August evening in 2024 won Ireland its first Olympic medal in gymnastics – and left him crying.
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Because this wasn’t just his lifelong dream being realised. It also felt like a moment of destiny being fulfilled, and the conquering of his Olympic demons, after what happened at the Tokyo Olympics three years before. For as long as McClenaghan can remember he’s been chasing perfection. Paris was as close as it gets – and it was never going to be easy or straightforward to follow that.
“It can be daunting, because for me it was always about winning that gold medal. But I am still obsessed with bettering my routine. That’s for certain.”
McClenaghan missed the rest of the 2024 season because of a shoulder injury. Essentially wear and tear on the right acromioclavicular (AC) joint, just like the left one, which had already been operated on in 2019. Months then turned into a year, and, after missing all of 2025, when the comedown after Paris eventually did arrive it was a lot starker than he’d imagined.
“Every gymnast has some kind of injury, but when it crosses that line of being unmanageable, that’s when it really affects you. It was bothering me for so long ... that’s looked after now. It feels great to back.
“But I think the injury did play a significant role in my mentality, a realisation of how fragile this journey is, in trying to win another Olympic gold medal. It became an entirely different process when I couldn’t even compete.
“So that was more where the comedown came after Paris. More of the shock, really, that if you’re injured you’re not the gymnast you want to be. But being back in the competitions also reminded me just how much I enjoy being in that environment. And I feel I’m more all-in than ever. Which is such a nice feeling to have.
“We’re nearly midway into the LA cycle – only for me it feels like the start of the Olympic build-up. But it’s not about me trying to get back to where I was. I’m trying to be better than what I was.”
He was back competing in March, almost 20 months after the Paris Olympics, but he’s exactly where he wants to be in his pursuit of a second gold medal. He considers this his McClenaghan 2.0.
There were other distractions during his time away – his wonderful foray into RTÉ’s Dancing with the Stars chief among them – but McClenaghan has never been shy of confidence. When he won his pommel horse gold in Paris, he was the only gymnast to be standing as Olympic, World, European and Commonwealth champion on a single apparatus.
[ ‘It always felt like it was going to happen’: Rhys McClenaghan’s Olympic destiny now fulfilled ]
He’s always been a diligent pupil of his event too, articulate and engaging, especially on the psychology and philosophy. When he slipped off the handles after just 10 seconds at the Tokyo Olympics, falling chest-first on to the horse and ending up seventh, he spoke immediately afterwards about being “more dangerous than ever before”.
“There will always be some doubts, but you can use that to your strength. My entire life has been around gymnastics. So all the improvements, or learning from the failures, it’s all happened in that arena.
“No one knows my gymnastics better than me. That’s an absolute certainty. And I keep playing tricks on myself, whenever I’m sore, I say, ‘You’re always sore, always tired’. I can’t start thinking I’m getting old. I’ve still got time, for sure.”
His main training base is at home in Newtownards, Co Down, in the Origin Gymnastics club run by his long-time coach Luke Carson. After their 10-year plan to win Olympic gold came to fruition in Paris, McClenaghan says Carson needed a reset as much as he did, but their paths to the Los Angeles Games in 2028 remain perfectly aligned.
Things have changed in other ways though. At the start of every Olympic cycle, World Gymnastics introduces a new code of points, which means McClenaghan’s overall score of 15.533 in Paris is already redundant.
“It used to be 10 skills, now it’s eight, so that’s 20 per cent of the routine gone. Which means the execution score is more valuable. It also brings everyone that bit closer together. So it’s not just about performing my routine again; it’s a new challenge, almost like a new style on pommel horse. The reason they change the rules is to make the sport more exciting, to challenge the gymnasts to do more diverse routines.
“If you look at Paris, a lot of those guys probably won’t be in the final in LA. There’s so many new names coming through. I just know I’m going there to win. I just need to make it happen. And I’ll do everything I possibly can. For me it’s all about consolidating another difficult routine for another Olympics in two years.”
He still places big value on these weekend trips to Dublin, joining up with national gymnastics squad, checking in with the Sport Ireland Institute doctors and physios. Plus his sports psychologist Jessie Barr. He’s never been shy about that need, either.
He’s a proper student of that now, too, starting an online psychology course at the Open University in January which allows him to delve further into his sporting destiny. In any twisted sense then, has he ever imagined his life had he not won that gold medal in Paris?
“Well,” he says with a short pause. “It would have been a hard pill to swallow. Not winning the Olympics, I would have found a way around it, I think. But I’m glad I don’t have to venture there.
“Maybe after I retire, I won’t look at the Olympic gold medal as everything. But on that day in Paris, it felt like everything, for sure. That’s still there, that’s never left me. Every competition I go to I’m trying to win, and I’ll stand on that statement until I retire.”
McClenaghan turns 27 in July and will be 29 by the time LA rolls around. In his first competition back, in Baku last month, he finished 10th, before winning a week later at the World Cup event in Antalya.
When he ended up winning Dancing with the Stars a year ago, with his professional dancing partner Laura Nolan, there were some other lasting lessons. Such as nothing about being in a reality TV show even scratching the surface of being inside the Olympic arena.
“It’s funny because people kept asking me was I nervous, but my tolerance for nerves and pressure is so much higher when a lifetime of work comes down to one day at the Olympics. And I trained the entire way through that show. Dancing six hours a day, then training here for another four, five hours in the evening.
“I can see why some people got the impression [of] I do Dancing with the Stars then don’t compete for the rest of the year. But it was all down the shoulder, unfortunately.
“Maybe afterwards I recognised it as distraction from that Paris comedown. But I know in Olympic sports, especially gymnastics, the opportunities you get are so few or far between. I have to say no to a lot of things, but when I finished the Olympics and was able to say yes to many things.”
He also said a definite yes to a trip to Windsor Castle, in February, collecting his MBE from Princess Anne, and he’s been dipping into the act of public speaking, one of the headline names at the Pendulum Summit in Dublin in January.
“I’ve always said recognition from anywhere outside this sport is meaningful. It still shocks me and surprises me every time gymnastics gets recognised like that. I’ve also grown up watching and taking inspiration from other public speakers, and if my story is somehow helping other people, that’s something I love to hear.
“I’m still on that journey, but on a different path now. Because of the rule changes I need to be a different gymnast, performing a different routine. It’s going in a completely different direction for LA and I’m really excited by that.”
He’s out again later this month at the Osijek World Cup, in Croatia, where as a 17-year-old in 2017 he scored his first international victory.
“Kind of back where it all started,” he says, still that giddy kid inside.
