A champion looks back at who he was

centre, who “very enthusiastically discussed his VO2 max values with me”.

The shooter shuffles at questions about his past, as if it’s a country he doesn’t want to return to. We dwell on the athlete’s glory days more than they care to do. We ache to rewind, they move forward. We see gold, they remember aching swarms of butterflies.

But he must miss something, some element of his younger crazy self, something so powerful which he still carries with him. He pauses. “When you’re an athlete you’re so incredibly bloody minded and I haven’t found that.” He laughs.

“It may come back.”

Mostly it doesn’t, for life rarely gets so intensely distilled again. The roar of ambition settles and focus fades like a painting left in the car. But with him at least a small part of what he built as an athlete remains. His strength.

His father hasn’t been well, a stress more penetrating than anything sport brings. But he’s befriended stress and even now he responds accordingly. “I kind of go into competition mode. To not get overwhelmed with emotion, to look at things clinically and find appropriate solutions”.

He says he only remembers “twothree shots” from a long career and I smell gentle exaggeration. But hey, he’s the athlete. Maybe, he laughs, it’s so few “because there’s a lot of trauma attached to competing. Part of my brain doesn’t want to go back to it.”

He used to train in Dortmund with coaches Gaby Buhlmann and Heinz Reinkemeier and still meets them but always in a neutral city. In eight years since he retired, he’s never returned to that German city because it’s where the butterflies in his stomach used to play havoc every day.

“It’s taken me eight years to heal. It takes a lot out of you”.

And yet that Olympic shot, the last one, the 10.8 he fired to win in 2008, that stays like, well, a first kiss.

“I close my eyes and I can feel it,” he says.

The Straits Times,

A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold. He posts