The U.S. men’s gymnastics team had high hopes for the Paris Olympics. After finishing fifth in the team event at the last three Olympic Games, it was time for a change. This time the team had its sights set on a medal—something they hadn’t achieved since the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]On July 29, the U.S. men’s team of Asher Hong, Paul Juda, Brody Malone, Stephen Nedoroscik, and Frederick Richard got it done and earned bronze behind Japan and China.
“We ended the medal drought that was 16 years in the making and I couldn’t be happier for everybody,” said Paul Juda, a University of Michigan gymnast.
Getting to the podium wasn’t just a matter of hitting every routine. The work began after the Tokyo Games, with some very deliberate strategizing. Under the current scoring system, athletes don’t start with the same score, such as a 10.0, but instead have varying start values, depending on the difficulty of the elements they perform in their routines. Those scores are added to a score that encapsulates how well they perform those skills for the total score. So the more difficult the routines are, the more likely gymnasts are to earn higher scores overall.
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USA Gymnastics men’s high-performance director Brett McClure knew that the U.S.’s difficulty scores, or start values, put them out of medal contention before they even hit the mats. No amount of perfect performances could change that. So he and his team focused heavily on incorporating more challenging skills in the gymnasts’ routines.
At the U.S. Olympic trials in June to determine the team for Paris, McClure rattled off the average difficulty of each of the top teams and calculated what the U.S. would need to make the podium—namely, outscoring squads such as Great Britain and Ukraine that have consistently surpassed the U.S. at recent world and Olympic events. In Tokyo, McClure said, the U.S. lagged about six points behind the bronze-medal finishers in difficulty scores, but by last year’s world championships, that gap had narrowed to about two points—easily bridged with stronger execution scores. “Japan’s difficulty right now is around 110, and China 108. Our difficulty scores are about 106 and Ukraine is 104 and Great Britain around 102. So we’re great considering where we were in Tokyo, when we were already six points behind. We’re in a much different position now.”
Indeed they were. Shaky performances during the qualification round in Paris, however, put the U.S. men back in their familiar position—fifth—coming into the team event. But in the team competition, qualification scores are scratched and scoring starts anew.
“You take it, you seize the moment,” said Richard, Juda’s teammate at Michigan. “After day one [qualification], I was the one who was saying, ‘It’s all part of the process, trust in the end goal.’ You don’t have to win every single competition; you have to win the ones that matter. I knew that the day-one goal was to qualify and get the nerves out. Going into day two, we needed to capitalize on all the hard work we’ve done and it showed. We didn’t wait to become the medalists. We decided we were going to do it. And every routine, we gave everything.”
That included Nedoroscik, who was controversially the only specialist on the team, selected for his high scoring ability on pommel horse. He competed only on pommel horse, and none of the other five events, and the competition order put the U.S. on pommel horse in the last of six rotations, with Nedoroscik the last U.S. gymnast to compete, meaning he waited two and a half hours before he was called up. When he was, he electrified the crowd with his impressive and smooth swings and helped the U.S. clinch the bronze. But until then, his meditating and visualization techniques inspired the internet, turning him into a social media sensation as everyone speculated about how he managed to make the trip to Paris to perform on one event and one event only, and how he was occupying himself while waiting his turn.
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Richard had not only his family from Stoughton, Mass. in Bercy Arena, but his first coach Tom Fontecchio, who saw potential in young Richard when he followed his older sister to Fontecchio’s gym in Massachusetts. The two remained close even after Richard left for college, and Fontecchio still watches every one of his former student’s meets and regularly texts him with words of encouragement. “He did a fantastic job,” Fontecchio told TIME. “In junior high, he had a goal listed in superlatives, and his superlative was, ‘I want to be an Olympian.’ He already knew that was going to be his goal and he just kept going with it.”
The U.S. got off to a strong start on the rings, with Richard, the current world all-around bronze medalist, breaking the ice with a solid routine that set the stage for Malone, the national champion, and Hong, six-time NCAA champion who, along with Richard, was part of the U.S. bronze-medal-winning team at world championships in 2023.
During Olympic trials, McClure’s priority was to find the combination of athletes whose scores, when combined, would give the U.S. the highest number of starting value points when the team competed in Paris. “The plan worked,” Jordan Gaarenstroom, one of Juda’s and Richard’s coaches at Michigan, told TIME. “It worked exactly how it should have worked. It was great to watch it.”
Under the Olympic format, three athletes compete on six apparatus and all three scores count (unlike during the qualification, in which four gymnasts compete on each event and the top three scores are used). Richard competed in five of the six events, as did Malone. Malone was more consistent than he was during the qualification round, in which he made mistakes on the high bar, floor, and pommel horse.
“It’s about having a short memory and putting it behind me,” Malone said. “Once it’s done and over with, it’s done and over with. I just had to reset my mind and get ready for the next competition, and that’s what I did.”
“Every single routine just kept getting better and better,” McClure said of the 18 solid performances the gymnasts executed. Juda said the team agreed ahead of time not to look at the scoreboard, which kept track of where they stood after each rotation. Whenever the placements were announced in the arena, “We joked, ‘We don’t want to know what place we are – stop telling us,'” he said. “It wasn’t a matter of knowing, but a matter of feeling [that we would earn a medal].”
Preparing the men included ensuring that they conserved their strength and energy for the multiple days of performance ahead. For Richard, who was expecting to compete in the all-around event, that meant building up gradually, especially in the high-bar event, one of his strengths. His routine in qualification was less difficult than the one he performed in the team competition. “This is a marathon, from two weeks ago when we got [to France], to training camp and then you come to Paris,” said Gaarenstroom. “And every day they are reminded they are Olympians. So it’s high and low and high and low—you’ve got to keep their energy in check so you just make small changes to give them a little less pressure.”
But Richard’s score in the qualification round, which determines who competes in the event finals, wasn’t high enough to qualify him for the high-bar final, after judges scored his routine lower than he and his coaches expected. “I knew this would be my high-bar final,” he said of the team event. “It’s the routine I train every single day in the gym, and I’m one of the best high-bar gymnasts in the world, so I wanted to show that today, to my brothers and to my country, and that’s what I did.”
Richard and Juda will be competing in the all-around competition on July 31. Juda jokes that Richard is always looking ahead and striving for more, saying there is always something “cooler” to be experienced, or accomplished. That will certainly be the case in Paris now that the team medal is around their necks. And it’s clear where that ambition comes from. When TIME asked Richard’s father Carl what he would say to his son, now an Olympic medalist, he said, “We love you and you’re the best. And you have one more achievement [left] here; bring another medal.” An Olympian’s job, it seems, is never done.
The gymnasts hope that the medal will reignite interest in men’s gymnastics in the U.S., at a time when many colleges are shutting down their programs and limiting funding for the sport. “Every single one of us came from an NCAA program,” Juda said. “If you want to keep seeing USA Gymnastics on the podium on the men’s side, you have to give us more opportunities to compete in college.”
McClure, for his part, is already looking ahead to 2028, when the Olympics will be held in Los Angeles. “We are trending in the right direction,” he said. “Obviously Japan and China are still in another category. But if we want to get better and push for first place in L.A., then this [bronze] is going to be extremely motivating.”
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