When Jake Jarman rang his biggest fan, his grandmother, after his initial golds, she was so excited he struggled to understand her.
Having won a fourth gymnastics title of these Commonwealth Games, one suspects Sheila was totally overcome with emotion last night.
Jarman’s success on the vault made him the first Englishman to win four golds in the sport in one Games, eclipsing the three achieved by Max Whitlock in 2014, a Games where Claudia Fragapane also came away with a quartet of titles.
With his parents often working, his nan would drive him to and from gymnastics training each day and sit in the stands watching him.
“I spoke to her on the phone the other day and she was over the moon,” said the 20-year-old. “I’ve never heard her so excited I was struggling to make out some of the words she was saying to be honest.”
A raft of not just English but British gold medallists has been unearthed using talent ID programmes.
Jarman’s entry into gymnastics was a talent ID of sorts. A hyperactive child who liked to throw himself from pillar to post was flying around on the monkey bars one day at about the age of seven when his mother was approached by a stranger.
Jarman said: “I was in the park in Peterborough and my mum told me a gym coach was in the park at the same time and told my mum, ‘You should bring your kid to one of the local clubs’.
“I was just swinging from the monkey bars. I’d like to think I was good at the monkey bars. It was one of the things I loved to do when I was young.”
With a natural aptitude for the sport, his progress was only checked by the Covid lockdown, which delayed the chance of the rising star of British Gymnastics to make a name for himself until these Games.
On his final apparatus, he was a class apart, the only athlete to attempt a vault with a 6.0 degree of difficulty meant he could afford minor mistakes and still win.
The celebrations were muted – a meal out as a team with the European Championships looming in little over a week’s time in Munich.
As for his haul of medals, the aim is to find a cabinet to put them in and take pride of place at home.
Team England came within a whisker of a clean sweep of golds in the men’s disciplines, Cyprus’s Ilias Georgiou the outlier in the final event with gold on the horizontal bars as Joe Fraser slipped.
It was 10 golds for England and 16 medals in all. Fraser narrowly missed out on matching the four titles of team-mate Jarman in front of his home crowd, although he claimed a third with a stand-out parallel bars routine.
That Fraser was here at all was no mean feat and, had it not been his home city, he may well have opted to preserve himself for the Europeans. His build-up made Adam Peaty’s look like plain sailing, first suffering a ruptured appendix five weeks before the opening ceremony and then fracturing his foot two weeks later.
Watching yesterday, you would have had no idea of his travails. Like Jarman on the vault, Fraser opted for the highest degree of difficulty on the parallel bars – a 6.5 – and comfortably landed it for a score of 15.000.
It resigned Giarnni Regini-Moran to a second silver of the day on his 24th birthday, and those inside Arena Birmingham broke out in an impromptu rendition of happy birthday.
While the English gymnasts have largely shone, Alice Kinsella, has struggled. She was inconsolable after a fall on the beam denied her a shot at a medal in the individual all-around. She had a wobble on the beam again in the individual but recovered to take gold on her final discipline, the floor.
