Australian diving gold medallist Matthew Mitcham has admitted that when he walked away from the sport in 2006, he had given up on his Olympic dream.
Not surprisingly the 20-year-old became emotional recalling the journey that had brought him to the pinnacle of his sport, breaking the Chinese stranglehold on diving at the Beijing Games.
"I left the sport without any intention of returning. I'd fallen out of love with diving," he said.
"I was emotionally and physically burnt out and it did take me a long time to recover mentally and physically and start to miss it, so I took the better part of a year away form the sport."
As to what brought him back, last year, the answer was simple. The Olympics.
"I had been diving for seven years, that's 10 sessions a week, that's 30 hours a week, for 50 weeks of the year for seven years. That's a very, very long time to not even reach the pinnacle of the sport, so I came back with the aim of going to the Olympics – and, ultimately, to win an Olympic gold medal."
"I wouldn't be here if I hadn't taken that time off," Mitcham confessed.
"I know it for sure because I came back with such a drive, such a burning desire and such fierce competitive spirit and I worked so hard and it's a little bit emotional, because I know that everything I did, all the sacrifices I made, how hard I had to work it's all paid off. It's all been worth it," he explained, his voice quivering.
Mitcham's sixth and last dive of the final, a backward dive with two-and-a-half somersaults and two-and-a-half twists, received the highest score for a single dive in Olympic history, 112.10, and lifted him to the gold medal by little more than four points from the Chinese favourite, Zhou Luxin.
"I often score more than 100 points on that dive. It's one of my most-consistent dives and it is the highest degree of difficulty dive that anyone does on platform."
"I knew that I could score more than 100 points with it but I didn't know I had to score more than (108) to win, but I went into it just wanting to enjoy it and have fun and do the best dive I could do and I knew that the points and the results would look after themselves."
He said he knew as soon as he entered the water that he had executed the 3.8 degree of diffuclty dive very well.
"I was still waiting for the scores to make sure, but it felt like a good dive, and when I saw the results on the scoreboard, because I was the second last diver and I was on top of the leaderboard, I said ‘Yes, I have a silver medal' and I was so happy with that."
"I got out of the pool and I was very emotional because I didn't think I would do that well, and then we watched the last dive and I ended up coming out on top, so it was very emotional for me because I never thought it would happen to me – not at this Olympics anyway."
Mitcham was embraced by fellow Aussie Mat Helm, who won silver in the same event in Athens four years ago but finished sixth in Saturday night's