Very few athletes travel to an Olympic Games with all their hopes pinned on a silver medal.
It's almost impossible to become an athlete of Olympic standard without possessing the sort of blind self-belief and determination that crystallises gold as the primary ambition to the exclusion of all else.
But there are a small handful of events where, for the vast majority of competitors and due to the other-worldly excellence of one other, silver is the best obtainable result.
Think of anyone racing Katie Ledecky in the 1,500m or Léon Marchand in just about anything at these Games. Their golds are almost marked down before the event begins, and the rest are left to fight over the scraps.
For Australia's Kurtis Marschall, his men's pole vault final was one of those events.
He arrived already in a battle for second, as nobody at these Olympic Games is as far above the rest of the world in their chosen field as Sweden's Armand 'Mondo' Duplantis.
He was not just the favourite, he is by some distance the best in the world and surely the greatest pole vaulter there has ever been.
So long as Duplantis competes to somewhere around 80 per cent of his best ability, none of the next 11 best vaulters can come close.
What an odd position that leaves Marschall in. Ranked the fifth best in the world, he is in the presence of greatness but not realistically able to touch it.
And so the battle for silver unfolded.
The first step for Marschall was to clear a bar at the Olympics, something he was unable to do in Tokyo. His "no-heighter" at his first Olympics stayed with him longer than he would have liked, initially dragging him down but eventually lighting a fire.
Marschall cruised over his first jump of 5.50m, and shed the monkey from his back in the process. Now he was free to compete.
Also firmly in the chase for a glorious silver were American Sam Kendricks, the Philippines' Ernest John Obiena and Greece's Emmanouil Karalis.
They breezed through their first jumps, before Duplantis eventually joined them in action at 5.70. Just warming up, you might say.
How does someone like Duplantis get created? Which lab was he constructed in, this elastic pop star on the end of a giant stick?
It may not surprise you to learn his father was a pole vaulter and his mother a heptathlete. His two older brothers were pole vaulters, as was his younger sister.
At three years old, growing up in LA, Duplantis was able to walk into his backyard and have a crack at a full pole vault set up. If you are a subscriber to the age-old "10,000 hours rule", one would have to imagine that Mondo passed that magical figure long ago.
Duplantis is a Tiger Woods, Williams sisters level of prodigy. At 24-years-old, he is by most measures the most dominant single athlete in the world.
He was born to do this, and has spent the vast majority of life preparing for moments like this one at the Stade de France.
Marschall was a comparative late-comer to the sport, picking it up at age 11 after watching in awe as Steve Hooker won gold in Beijing.
He took to it quickly, but didn't commit fully until he was 16 at which point he gave up playing Aussie rules and went all in on pole vault.
Among Marschall's goals is finally clearing a bar set at 6m high. That 6m mark, he says, is the equivalent of the 10-second barrier for 100m sprinters.
For reference, Duplantis cracked 6m when he was 18-years-old.
Marschall stumbled at 5.80, cleared 5.85, and then worked his way up to an all-or-nothing shot at getting over 5.95. We were in medal territory, and Marschall had no more lives left to use.
It was not to be. The tumbling bar meant Marschall finished sixth, a creditable return and a wiping clean of the slate left dirtied by Tokyo.
Kendricks and Karalis would take the silver and bronze respectively, each celebrating as if they were gold.
But Mondo wasn't done yet.
Duplantis has spent the last four years steadily setting and breaking his own world records. The best eight jumps in history belong to the Swede, and the only thing left to decide in Paris, apart from the silver and bronze medals, was whether Mondo could crack 6.25m and make that nine.
First up, the Olympic record. It had sat at 6.03 for eight years, so Duplantis whacked the bar up to 6.10 and cleared it with room to spare.
There was no need for any more build up.
The bar was set at 6.25, the world record was in play, and the crowd was expectant — at this point it would have come as a surprise if he didn't make history.
His first jump was close, but his trail arm clipped the bar on the way down. The second was less convincing.
Duplantis took his time. The crowd sang and danced and threatened to explode.
By the time he took his position, with Marschall and Kendricks leading the cheer squad just to his left, the collective will of 75,000 people could have lifted him over that bar even if the pole didn't.
Mondo elevated, extended, recoiled and released.
The bar was not so much as brushed, and the roof came off the Stade de France.
There are no limits on what Duplantis's future could hold. His records will surely continue to tumble, and he conceivably could yet have two more Olympic campaigns to come.
He is absurdly marketable, looking so much like actor Jeremy Allen White that it is jarring to see him here, rather than in the kitchen of The Bear swearing at his cousin and perfecting his list of non-negotiables.
He is laser-focused, impossibly cool and beyond talented.
He is going to take this sport to previously unthinkable heights.
Kurtis Marschall had a front row seat to history. It's not a level he — or maybe anyone — could hope to reach, but he will forever be able to say he threw everything he had at the best there will ever be.
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