José Torres Gil is riding high!

The Argentine rider wowed his way to a gold medal with a stunning initial score of 94.82 at the 20024 Paris Games in the Men’s BMX Park final on Wednesday.

With the victor, Torres Gil not only claimed Argentina’s first medal of the 2024 Summer Games, he also won his country’s first individual gold medal in a cycling discipline.

“I couldn’t understand it, total craziness, it brought tears to my eyes,” was how Torres Gil explained hearing that he would be crowned Olympic champion at the Place de la Concorde, the temporary home of the Urban Sports Park.

Great Britain’s Keiran Reilly took silver after packing trick after trick into his second run, hauling himself above France’s Anthony Jeanjean with the final act of the competition. As he threw his bike across the boarded floor and dropped to his knees in exhaustion, you knew he had given all he could.

“It was probably the best final that we’ve ever seen on the international stage,” said Jeanjean, whose score of 93.76 was enough to win gold at the 2020 Tokyo Games three years ago.

A rider is scored out of 100 based on the best of their two 60-second runs in an Olympic final, this the second time the freestyle format has appeared at the Olympic Games, and points are awarded based on several criteria, including the difficulty, variety, creativity and execution of their tricks.

Torres Gil’s gold medal was the first for a South American nation at these Games and, in his first Olympics, he added to the Pan American Games title he won last year.

He was unfancied going into the final having qualified in seventh place with an average score of 86.66. That was behind Reilly, who qualified first, and the American duo of Marcus Christopher and Justin Dowell in second and fourth.

Martin occupied the third qualifying spot and Jeanjean the fifth, but it was Torres Gil who rose to the occasion with a high-scoring first run, which would stand as the benchmark for most of the competition.

Perhaps, though, that is part and parcel of the Olympics: where the unexpected can happen and the unfancied can become eternal.

“The level was extraordinary,” he said in his press conference. “The best athletes of the planet were here in Paris. I competed against the best of the world and I felt incredible; I feel part of this incredible universe.”