King Midas famously requested that anything he touched would turn to gold, although when he discovered the peril of his wish, he begged Dionysusto to reverse the spell.

The god relented and told Midas to plunge his hands into the river Pactolus.

Antoine Dupont will not be repeating the same act in the River Seine this morning. The man with the Midas touch caresses his Olympic medal after France beat Fiji in the Rugby Sevens Final at Stade de France last night.

There are no unused superlative remaining to describe the talents of this wonderful rugby player.

Everything he touches turns to rugby gold. He had played rugby in one form or another virtually non-stop for the last two years and yet his standards have not dropped for a single moment, in fact he just appears to get better and better.

He entered the field at half-time in a damp, grey final and turned the game on its head.

Dupont grabbed hold of the match with both hands both feet and every other available part of his anatomy, Fiji didn’t get a look in throughout the whole of the second period.

75,000 serenaded the home team to victory against a Fiji side that had never lost an Olympic Sevens match in the history of their participation in the games.

Cliff Morgan once said of another pretty good scrum-half after he scored a try – ‘If the greatest writer of the written word would have written that story, no one would have believed it’. That player was Gareth Edwards.

Dupont’s impact and his two tries would have tested the literary skills of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, George Sand, and even Voltaire.

Nine months ago, the Toulouse scrum left the Stade de France distraught and in tears following Les Bleus defeat to South Africa in the quarter-final of the 2023 Rugby World Cup.

This time, for the man with the Midas touch, it was tears of joy that mingled with the Parisian drizzle.