American men hadn’t medaled as a team in Olympic gymnastics since the dying days of George W. Bush’s administration, so USA Gymnastics hired a specialist to try to fix that.
Its gamble paid off.
The U.S. men won the bronze medal in Monday’s team final, clinching their first team Olympic medal since 2008.
Stephen Nedoroscik qualified for the Olympic team solely on the strength of his pommel horse routine.
He was forced to sit on the sidelines for nearly three hours during the first five rotations before he anchored the U.S. on his specialty event. Nedoroscik stayed warm and focused and appeared to be meditating on the NBC broadcast before his routine.
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When the time came, he hit it out of the park and secured a podium finish for Team USA.
What made the Nedoroscik, 25, a unique — and somewhat controversial — Olympic selection is that he does only one of six events. Typically high-level gymnasts are expected to be representative in several, if not all events.
The math worked well for Nedoroscik, a Penn State alum, and he gave Team USA its best shot at winning a team medal, as well as individual Olympic glory.
He’s the only American man who qualified for an individual apparatus final in Paris, though Fred Richard won all-around bronze at last year’s world championships and Brady Malone won the world title on the horizontal bar in 2022.
Richard and Paul Juda qualified for the all-around final. Nedoroscik qualified in second place for the pommel horse final with an enormous score of 15.200.
In the men’s team final, three gymnasts from each squad performed in six events — floor, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars and horizontal bar.
There’s no limit or minimum number of events a gymnast can perform as long as all six events get three performances from each team. All scores count.
“What it comes down to is that [Nedoroscik’s] scores on pommel horse are so much higher than everybody else on that one event that he adds a tremendous amount of potential score,” said NBC Sports gymnastics analyst Tim Daggett, a 1984 gold medalist.
Nedoroscik’s strength happens to be a weakness for the rest of the U.S. squad, making him more valuable to the team score than as an all-around gymnast who has the same strengths as the other athletes.
“That one routine from Nedoroscik gives Team USA basically a full point over the next guy in line for the USA,” Daggett said.
In the three years between the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, the U.S. men’s program has worked to increase its start values, or difficulty scores, to help close the gap against Japan, China and Great Britain, who regularly medal in the team event.
Japan won gold, China took silver, and Great Britain finished fourth.
The relative lack of difficulty on the men’s team made the Nedoroscik gamble all the more necessary.
“We’re in a much different position now,” high performance director Brett McClure said of the Paris Olympic team at the Olympic trials. “We’re going to be able to control our own destiny. We’re going to get back on that podium. That’s the expectation, and that’s our goal.”
McClure estimated the U.S. men’s scoring potential, including Nedoroscik’s pommel horse routine, to be third in the world heading into Paris, behind China and Japan. In the qualifying round, they struggled with consistency and placed fifth.
The current team’s skills have increased in difficulty by over a point since last year’s world championships, where the U.S. team also won a historic bronze medal.
The men’s Olympic medal drought is in stark contrast to the U.S. women, who have won a team medal at every Olympics since 1992. They won the gold medal in 1996, 2012 and 2016.
The women’s team is loaded from top to bottom with gymnasts who perform the world’s most difficult skills, giving it a buffer equal to multiple falls. The U.S. men don’t have the same advantage, but they can finally hang with the best in the world when they execute well.
They were close to flawless Monday, while other top teams suffered falls.
In Tokyo three years ago, Russia took men’s team gold, host Japan silver and China bronze. Fourth-place Great Britain and the fifth-place Americans missed the podium. Russian gymnasts won’t compete in Paris because of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
