Since the final days of George W. Bush’s presidency, American men have not won an Olympic gymnastics medal as a team. USA Gymnastics hired an expert to perhaps change that.
Pommel horse skills alone allowed Stephen Nedoroscik to earn a spot on the American men’s Olympic gymnastics team.
Before he can finally compete at the end of the competition, he will have to watch the first five revolutions of Monday’s team final from the sidelines.
Nedoroscik, 25, is a unique and somewhat contentious Olympic selection because he competes in just one of six sports. Elite gymnasts are usually required to represent their country in multiple events if not all of them.
Nedoroscik, a Penn State alum, has good math skills and maybe Team USA’s best chance of earning a team medal—an accomplishment American men haven’t accomplished since taking home a bronze in Beijing in 2008.
So far, the gamble has paid off.
Although Brady Malone won the world title on the horizontal bar in 2022 and Fred Richard won the bronze in the all-around competition at the previous year’s world championships, he is the only American male to have advanced to the final of an individual event in Paris.
With a staggering score of 15.200, Nedoroscik qualified for the pommel horse final in second place.
Three gymnasts from each squad compete in six events in the men’s team final: floor, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars, and horizontal bar.
A gymnast can perform in as many or as few events as they like, as long as each of the six events receives three performances from each team. Every score matters.
Gold medallist Tim Daggett, an analyst for NBC Sports gymnastics, explained, “In essence, it’s all about how much more potential point Nedoroscik adds because his pommel horse scores are so far higher than everyone else’s on that one event.”
Nedoroscik is more significant to the team score than an all-around gymnast with the same strengths as the other competitors because his strength also happens to be a weakness for the rest of the U.S. squad.
“Nedoroscik’s one routine effectively gives Team USA a full point advantage over the next American player in line,” Daggett stated.
The U.S. men’s program has pushed to raise their start values, or difficulty scores, in the three years between the Olympics in Tokyo and Paris. This has helped them get closer to Japan, China, and Great Britain, who consistently medal in the team event.
The Nedoroscik gamble is even more important given how easy the men’s squad has it compared to other teams.
Regarding the Olympic team in Paris, high-performance director Brett McClure remarked, “We’re in a much different position now.” “We will have the ability to direct our own course in life. We will return to that platform. That’s what we hope to achieve and what is expected.”
Before Paris, McClure projected the men’s scoring potential for the United States to be third in the world, after Japan and China, and to include Nedoroscik’s pommel horse performance. They had trouble staying consistent in the qualifying phase, finishing in fifth place.
The skills used by the current squad are already more challenging than they were at the global championships last year when the U.S. team placed third.
The American women have won a team medal at every Olympics since 1992, a stark contrast to the men’s lack of medals at the games. They won gold medals in 1996, 2012, and 2016.
The women’s team is stacked from top to bottom with gymnasts who execute the hardest skills on the planet, providing them with a safety net equivalent to several falls. Though they don’t have the same edge, American men may now compete on an equal footing with the world’s finest.
They will probably need to perform almost perfectly in order to win the much-awaited team medal.
Russia won the men’s team gold, Japan got second place, and China took bronze in Tokyo three years ago. Britain in fourth place and the Americans in fifth place failed to make it to the podium. Due to the current conflict in Ukraine, Russian gymnasts have decided not to compete in Paris.
At Paris’s Bercy Arena on Monday, the men’s team final will take place.