TThe U.S. men’s gymnastics team had high hopes for the Paris Olympics. After finishing fifth in the team event at last three Olympic Games, it was time for a change. This time the team had their sights set on a medal – something they hadn’t achieved since the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
On July 29, the US men’s team of Asher Hong, Paul Juda, Brody Malone, Stephen Nedoroscik and Frederick Richard achieved the feat and won bronze, behind Japan and China.
“We ended the 16-year medal drought and I couldn’t be happier for everyone,” said University of Michigan gymnast Paul Juda.
Reaching the podium wasn’t just a matter of completing all the routines. Work began after the Tokyo Games, with some very deliberate strategies. In the current scoring system, athletes do not start with the same score, such as 10.0, but have varying starting values depending on the difficulty of the elements they perform in their routines. These scores are added to a score that summarizes the performance of these skills into the total score. Therefore, the more difficult the routines, the more likely gymnasts are to achieve higher overall scores.
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USA Gymnastics men’s high performance director Brett McClure knew that the USA’s difficulty scores, or starting values, put them out of medal contention before they even got to the mat. No amount of perfect performances could change that. Therefore, he and his team focused heavily on incorporating more challenging skills into the gymnasts’ routines.
At the U.S. Olympic qualifiers in June to determine the Paris team, McClure recited the average difficulty of each of the top teams and calculated what the U.S. would need to make the podium—that is, overcome teams like Great Britain and Ukraine, who have consistently outperformed the US in recent world and Olympic events. In Tokyo, McClure said, the U.S. was about six points behind the bronze medal winners in difficulty scores, but at last year’s world championships that gap narrowed to about two points — easily overcome with stronger execution scores. “Japan’s difficulty right now is about 110 and China’s is about 108. Our difficulty scores are about 106 and Ukraine is about 104 and Britain is about 102. So we’re doing great considering where we were in Tokyo, when we were already six points behind. We are in a very different position now.”
In fact they were. Shaky performances during the qualifying round in Paris, however, put the Americans back in their familiar position – fifth – entering the team event. But in team competition, the qualifying scores are crossed out and scoring starts again.
“You enjoy it, you enjoy the moment,” said Richard, Juda’s teammate at Michigan. “After the first day [qualification], I was the one who said, ‘It’s all part of the process, trust in the end goal.’ You don’t have to win every competition; you have to beat those who matter. I knew the goal of day one was to qualify and calm my nerves. On day two we needed to capitalize on all the hard work we had done and it showed. We don’t wait to become medalists. We decided we were going to do it. And in every routine, we gave everything.”
This included Nedoroscik, who was controversially the team’s only specialist, selected for his high scoring ability on pommel horse. He only competed on the pommel horse, and in none of the other five events, and the order of competition placed the USA on the pommel horse in the last of the six rotations, with Nedoroscik being the last North American gymnast to compete, meaning he He waited two and a half hours before he was summoned. When he was, he electrified the crowd with his stunning, smooth strikes and helped the USA win bronze. But by then, his meditation and visualization techniques had inspired the internet, turning him into a social media sensation as everyone speculated about how he managed to travel to Paris to perform at one event and one event only, and how he was keeping himself busy. while waiting your turn.
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Richard not only had his family from Stoughton, Massachusetts, at Bercy Arena, but also 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 attends each of his alumni reunions and regularly texts him words of encouragement. “He did a fantastic job,” Fontecchio told TIME. “In elementary school, he had a goal listed in superlatives, and his superlative was, ‘I want to be an Olympic athlete.’ He already knew this was going to be his goal and he just went for it.”
The U.S. got off to a strong start in the ring, with Richard, the reigning world bronze medalist, breaking the ice with a solid routine that set the stage for Malone, the national champion, and Hong, the six-time NCAA champion. who, along with Richard, was part of the bronze medal-winning North American team at the 2023 world championships.
During the Olympic Trials, McClure’s priority was to find the combination of athletes whose scores, when combined, would give the U.S. the most starting value points when the team competed in Paris. “The plan worked,” Jordan Gaarenstroom, one of Juda and Richard’s coaches at Michigan, tells TIME. “It worked exactly as it should have worked. It was great to watch.”
In the Olympic format, three athletes compete on six apparatus and all three scores count (unlike qualifying, in which four gymnasts compete in each event and the three best scores are used). Richard competed in five of the six events, as did Malone. Malone was more consistent than in the qualifying round, in which he made mistakes on the high bar, floor exercise and pommel horse.
“It’s a matter of having a short memory and putting it behind you,” Malone said. “Once it’s done and over, it’s done and over. I just had to reset my mind and prepare for the next competition, and that’s what I did.”
“Every routine got better and better,” McClure said of the 18 solid performances the gymnasts turned in. Juda said the team agreed in advance not to look at the scoreboard, which monitored its position after each rotation. Whenever placings were announced in the arena, “we would joke, ‘We don’t want to know where we are – stop telling us,'” he said. “It wasn’t a question of knowing, but of feeling. [that we would earn a medal].”
The men’s preparation included ensuring that they conserved their strength and energy for the several days of performance that lay ahead. For Richard, who hoped to compete in the all-around event, this meant gradually building, especially in the high bar event, one of his strengths. His qualifying routine was less difficult than the one he performed in the team competition. “This is a marathon, from two weeks ago, when we arrived [to France], to the training camp and then you come to Paris,” said Gaarenstroom. “And every day they are reminded that they are Olympians. So it’s up and down and up and down – you have to keep their energy in check, so just make small changes to give them a little less pressure.”
But Richard’s score in the qualifying round, which determines who will compete in the event finals, was not high enough to qualify him for the high bar final, after the judges scored his routine lower than he and his coaches expected, so he knew he would only get one chance to do the more challenging routine. “I knew this was going to be my high-profile final,” he said of the team event. “It’s the routine I practice every 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 compete in the general competition on July 31st. Juda jokes that Richard is always looking ahead and striving for more, saying that there is always something “cooler” to try or accomplish. That will certainly be the case in Paris now that the team’s medal hangs around its neck. And it is clear where this 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 are the best. And you have one more achievement [left] here; bring another medal. An Olympic athlete’s work, it seems, is never done.
Gymnasts hope the medal will reignite interest in men’s gymnastics in the U.S. at a time when many colleges are closing their programs and limiting funding for the sport. “We each came from an NCAA program,” Juda said. “If you want to continue seeing USA Gymnastics on the podium on the men’s side, you’re going to have to give us more opportunities to compete in college.”
McClure, in turn, is already looking ahead to 2028, when the Olympics will be held in Los Angeles. “We are moving in the right direction,” he said. “Obviously Japan and China are still in another category. But if we want to improve and fight for first place in Los Angeles, then this [bronze] It will be extremely motivating.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
