Malachy Clerkin: Citius, Altius, Fortius, Look at the state of us - the Olympics have been a riot of emotions

It was late on Wednesday night and the lights were dancing on the Champs Élysées. From the Grand Palais on one side of the Seine down to the Eiffel Tower on the other, people milled around in their thousands. Nobody seemed to be heading anywhere in particular. They were mostly just being at the Olympics.

Off to the side of a humongous hangar selling official Olympic merch, a dozen young Irish people were cackling and jigging about the place as a small woman in a South Korea tracksuit tried to get them to stand still for a photo. On closer inspection, you could see that one of them was Jack Woolley, the 25-year-old from Tallaght who had been knocked out of the taekwondo competition about 90 minutes previously. Now here he was, just another tiny pinball bouncing around the Olympic bumpers.

So much of high level sport is purposeful, painstaking and paranoid. If you’re not preparing for the next thing, you’re worrying about why not. You’re always behind, catching up and where you think you’re supposed to be. And then it’s over, and you don’t know what to be at.

Woolley and his friends started doing this thing with their fingers for the photo, as if they were trying to snap them shut on a passing fly. The Korean lady found this hilarious and joined in, getting someone else to take the photo while she stood fingersnapping with her new Irish gang. When it was done, everybody hugged it out. Woolley stood off to the side and smiled, bathing in the simple pleasure of larking about on a night of long deferred freedom.