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LE BOURGET, France – Sam Watson climbed a 49-foot overhanging wall here Thursday in 4.74 seconds and did not win Olympic gold.

He scurried up a more than vertical surface like an oversized squirrel, completing this standardized “speed climbing” course faster than any human before him.

He returned to earth as the fastest man in the fastest Olympic sport and thousands of fans rose to greet him.

And then, minutes later, he forced a smile, with a bronze medal around his neck.

Watson, an 18-year-old Texan, wasn’t sure how to navigate this strange dichotomy. “I haven’t really been through it yet,” he said here at the Le Bourget climbing site. He had mastered this wild, instantaneous sport, but also suffered from its ridiculously small limits.

“Speed ​​climbing is probably the sport with the lowest error rate at any Olympic Games,” he said a few hours after he and his fellow climbers had proven it.

Take, for example, a quarter-final between reigning world champion Matteo Zurloni of Italy and China’s Peng Wu. They heard the starting gun. They shot into the sky, using the 20 red handholds and 11 smaller footholds on each wall to propel themselves upward. They hit a time board almost simultaneously and looked at a clock that had grown to three decimal places.

Zurloni’s 4,997 was red, and “Wow, damn it,” he thought. He put his hands on his head as he floated back to earth, controlled by a harness.

Peng, standing five feet away, was “excited.” His watch was green and showed 4.995.

Watson, on the other hand, made it through his quarterfinals with ease. Earlier in the week, he had set a world record in the qualifying heats with a time of 4.75 seconds. But here, minutes later, in the semifinal against Peng, near the top of a gravity-defying obstacle course he had completed thousands of times, he was “a few millimeters away from a certain handhold,” he said. That cost him a little strength and, he estimates, 0.2 seconds. He lost to Peng by 0.08 seconds.

“I just lost the most important game of my life,” thought Watson.

But he didn’t have time to think about that thought. “Now in five minutes I have the next most important race of my life, one after the other,” he said.

And in this race, his last in this Olympic rapid-fire competition, he beat his own world record by 0.01 seconds in the “small final”, reaching a time of 4.74 seconds.

A minute later, Indonesian Veddriq Leonardo clocked a time of 4.75 in the grand final. Peng clocked a time of 4.77. All of them were faster than anyone else this week.

In speed climbing, the course is always the same and never varies. This allows you to build muscle memory and strive for perfection.

Watson’s goal, he said, is to one day climb the wall in under 4.6 seconds. (Zurloni said he believes speed climbers will eventually reach 4.4 seconds.) He has been training for that for years, perhaps since he started the sport at age five. He has put in hour after hour. He is dedicated to a sport that often results in horrific injuries – lost fingernails, sprained toes, bloody cuts, scraped knees – and that lets nothing stop its athletes.

He has now come to terms with the leeway. “There are 30 movements at top speed, mistakes can happen,” he says.

However, nothing could prepare him for the storm of “complicated” emotions he felt on Thursday.

“You come here with the goal of winning gold,” he admitted hours after winning the bronze medal. He felt something – he couldn’t quite put his finger on what – as the gold slipped away from him.

“But,” after breaking the world record five minutes later, “I really took it in,” Watson said. He hugged his coach and family. He looked for a board with his time displayed and asked the organizers to organize “a Usain Bolt-style photo.” He wanted to say “a huge thank you for making my crazy ideas possible.”

And “to be an Olympic medalist and to hold that medal in my hand along with a piece of the original Eiffel Tower, no one will ever take that away from me,” he said as the process began. “No one will ever take away any of the four world records I’ve broken. I’ll keep that for the rest of my life.”