When Kris Blak, 38, received a telephone call from the event organisers he jumped at the chance to perform his mentalist act and cabaret show at the Athletes’ Village in Dalmarnock. But as the day of his performance drew closer Kris admitted his nerves kicked in – more so than usual.

He said: “When I got the call I said yes right away, but then as the show drew closer I starting thinking about things like language barriers and possible communication issues with such a multi-national audience.

“I was worried about having to decipher names that I would perhaps struggle to pronounce them and I knew I would have to speak more slowly and clearly, but it went down well on the night.

“Many of the audience members spoke English, and there were hundreds of athletes from England, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, and a large contingent from Trinidad and Tobago who got really involved in the show. I watched quite a lot of the Games and I noticed quite a few faces from the audience were on TV.” The former Hermitage Academy pupil had to pass through the venue’s ‘airport-like’ security, however once he was on stage it was down to business.

In his act, Kris performed with casino chips, dice, and he even created a sports-themed section. However, one of his most well-received acts involved three hard back novels. He asked the participant – selected at random – to pick one word at random from any of the three books. Kris then wrote down the word he thought they selected on a white board, and Kris asked the participant to shout out the word as he simultaneously turned around the white board to display the same word.

He said: “The audience just gasped. It’s that ‘oh my god’ reaction that I love to get.

“If someone doesn’t believe in what I’m doing I like to bring them up on stage to participate, and that’s when I get the biggest pay off – when they say ‘how did he do that?’.” Kris became interested in performing acts of ‘mind reading’ after watching Derren Brown on TV.

He added: “I have always been interested in magic – I love the mystery of it all – and I just thought ‘I’m going to look into this’ and I just read everything I could find on it. I have always been a performer and actor anyway so it didn’t take much for me to make the leap to performing on stage.” Kris said his experience at the Games was the podium-topping highlight of his career. He added: “It was wonderful getting to perform for the Games, but in a way, because of the mental place I have to be in before I perform, I didn’t appreciate it at the time too much, it was more on reflection.” Kris is also expected to feature on a BBC documentary Viva Variety, due to air some time next month.

Visit www.krisblak.com for more information.