LOOK elsewhere if you want another one of those touchy-feely upbeat stories about the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. While his hammer colleague Mark Dry got the fairytale ending with a bronze medal, Chris Bennett’s Antipodean adventure was every bit as agonizing as that experienced by collapsed marathon runner Callum Hawkins.

Four years after finishing last at Glasgow 2014, Bennett went into the Games nursing genuine hopes of a medal, an idea bolstered by a throw of 75m shortly after getting off the plane which would have been good enough for silver. But all that thankless toil didn’t help him much on the day.

Sick with nerves, he finished back in 10th with a throw of 65.22m.

Distraught when he spoke to the media afterwards, thankfully Bennett is back to his larger-than-life self when we speak at the Emirates Arena. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some serious soul-searching since, not least on what he called a flight from hell.

“I’m all right actually now,” says Bennett. “I’m glad I’m back. I had a near mental breakdown after getting on that flight – the flight from hell – so it’s good, I’m getting there. I did pay for an upgrade and it was still the worst flight I’d ever been on. I took a few sleeping tablets and I was out for the count for 16 hours of the flight and it was still the longest flight of my life.

“I’m a very social person and everyone had left by the time I was going, so I was just sitting at the airport crying my eyes out, saying I just want to go home here. So it was hard but we’re back now, Gold Coast is done. I can’t change it, it happened.

“Nothing will ever be as hard as the walk back into the village because I just didn’t want people to ask me how I did because I was embarrassed. I remember walking up with Julie [Mollison] and there was a woman, a volunteer, she was like ‘ah team

Scotland, can I get a pin [badge]?’ And at that moment I just wanted to go, ‘do you know what? F*** off’. That’s how I felt. But she was really good at defusing that situation.”

What made matters worse for Bennett was that his mother Margaret had travelled out there to see him, only for her to be uncontactable afterwards.

“It was more the fact she had come all the way to Australia to see me completely f*** it up, that was a hard one,” he said. “I tried to find her after the competition and I couldn’t find her, so I was even more distressed.”

If there is a positive to come out of the whole experience, it is the fact that Bennett has realised that he is getting too emotionally involved when it comes to competing for Scotland at games such as these.

While it would be easy to throw himself headlong into desperately attempting to atone for it in Birmingham in four years’ time, Bennett is working with a sports psychologist and feels that stripping some of the emotion out of it may be a better course of action.

“I said after Glasgow that I didn’t want to do that again, yet I did the exact same thing so I need to look at it and take the emotion out of it because every time there’s emotion, pressure – or I feel there’s pressure on me – I seem to just, you know, my bum collapses,” he said.

“So I’ve got four-and-a-half years to fix it before Birmingham and I don’t want to be defined as somebody who has been to three Commonwealth Games – you hear about these guys who are 50, 60 years old. ‘Oh I used to play football, I had trials for Celtic’ – you sound like one of those guys, if you know what I mean.

“If you look back on the 16, 17, 18-year-old me, I’m almost overachieving in the sport in my eyes but when you get here, you don’t just want to go for a tracksuit and just be there to make up the numbers, you want to go there and win medals. You feel a bit

embarrassed when you don’t come back with anything.

“In Rio I didn’t really have any nerves. I was one of those guys who was happy to be there and be classed as an Olympian because I had no clue I was going until they phoned me the day before. But then you look at Gold Coast and although a lot of people didn’t big it up, I big myself up as wanting to get a medal and it’s the pressure I put on myself. So it’s me, myself and I that is the problem.

“I’ve started working with Zara Lipsey, she does a lot with the footballers and she’s good for me. She helped me a lot in the past when my dad died and my coach died so she understands me, I don’t have to go back in and explain my whole story and that I’m a closed book and I don’t like to really tell people things. It’s about working towards Birmingham now. But there’s still Tokyo on the horizon, next year’s qualification for Tokyo in Doha.

“Australia as a whole was good, if you could take away the competing side of things. If you could take away that one two-hour blip it was brilliant, but just the two-hour blip defined it.”