Former weightlifter Matt Vine takes some time to warm up when he’s asked to reflect on competing at the Olympic Games.

In many ways, 1988 seems like a lifetime ago, and Vine’s focus these days is firmly on his work at Maidstone Weightlifting Club.

He genuinely means it when he says he finds it more exciting to help youngsters make their way in the sport.

And his work on that front will be on show when the club co-host the England Age Group Championships at Maidstone Leisure Centre next weekend (February 23-25).

“Sometimes it’s a conversation-starter, no more than that,” says Vine. “It breaks the ice. I don’t look at it any other way.

“I find this much more exciting now than even thinking about what happened all those years ago because it’s new and fresh.”

But the past is there to be celebrated, too, and no one can take away Vine’s achievement in competing at the Olympics.

Maidstone born-and-bred, he was 29 when he got selected for the Seoul Games, where he finished ninth.

He was balancing training with his work in telecommunications when he was named in the Great Britain squad.

“I was in the British team for a few years and there were various competitions in that Olympic year where we had to do various qualification standards,” recalled Vine.

“It all boiled down to a final trial where they actually selected the team, which was in Edinburgh.

“I knew I was going to be close but I didn’t want to get too excited.

“There was no internet in those days, everything was done manually, so you had to read the team out.

“I remember the day they announced the team - I was just lost for words. It was quite surreal.

“It was an element of fact and fantasy, a mixture of the two. Is it really going to happen? Am I dreaming this?

“For certain people, it’s a foregone conclusion they’re going to go to the Olympics and get a medal but most of us are just trying to get there and do as well as you possibly can.”

As well as no internet, there were no mobile phones.

“We got back to the hotel and I rang the family on a pay phone,” said Vine.

“I said, ‘I can’t believe it’. Those were my words. That was the way it was. I was 29.

“I think it fell into place a bit because I’d been in the team for a number of years, getting more and more experience.

“In some ways all those trials and tribulations of it going well and sometimes disastrously wrong, that all contributed to preparing you.

“Sometimes you get a situation where a sportsman can get somewhere very young, very quickly but they’ve never been challenged and sometimes when they get challnged in a big event that’s when it goes wrong.

“Sometimes you need that background of ups and downs and having to regroup and lick your wounds and carry on. It’s all part of the process.

“When you get to the Games, you need that preparation because you’ve got to try and give as good an account of yourself as possible.”

The late-80s was a golden era for athletics and Vine found himself around the sport’s biggest stars when he boarded the chartered flight to Seoul at Heathrow Airport. To a point, anyway.

“It was quite funny because at the time athletes were the footballers of today - they were incredibly high-paid,” said Vine.

“They were on £20-30,000 a race, some of those athletes, because it was a boom sport with people like Seb Coe, Steve Ovett, Carl Lewis, all these people. It was an incredibly high-profile sport.

“As we were walking towards the plane most of the athletes turned right and then people like Steve Cram all turned left for the upgraded first-class tickets.”

Arriving at the newly-built Olympic village - to be used as residential homes after the Games - was “quite a buzz” for Vine, as was the first morning going down for breakfast in the food hall.

Vine was asked by a Kent Messenger journalist before leaving for Seoul whether he would get a medal.

He knew that was unlikely but achieved his target of breaking into the top 10.

“I had no chance of getting a medal because I was provisionally ranked about No.14,” remembers Vine.

“I said if I could get top 10 I‘d be chuffed with that.

“A couple of lifters pulled out and there was a situation where a few were pushing for medals and in their efforts to push for medals unfortunately they didn’t score and I came ninth.

“That was as good as I could have hoped for.”