TThe name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue – Stephen Nedoroscik – but you can just call him The Pommel Horse Guy.
That’s what social media is dubbing its newly minted star.
It’s Nedoroscik’s specialty in gymnastics and the only reason he was placed on the United States men’s national team. The Massachusetts native now trains in Florida and is a four-time U.S. champion, two-time NCAA champion and 2021 world champion in the event.
Pommel horse? What is that? This is the event in which the gymnasts ride – yes, ride – what is called a 160 cm horse. length and 135 cm. wide with two straps at the top. You grab the handles and swing your legs creatively – around, above and to the side of the horse. You can even move from one end of the horse to the other – a move that Nedoroscik does especially well.
See more information: How the US men’s gymnastics team won its first medal in 16 years
Nedoroscik was placed on the five-member U.S. Olympic team because he is so good at that event. His choice surprised many gymnastics fans, who questioned the sanity of USA Gymnastics in having a specialist who only competes in one of the six men’s gymnastics events. What if he makes a mistake? What if other gymnasts on the team get injured and you run out of alternatives to replace them? Being a specialist in the world of gymnastics is therefore a very risky thing to be.
But all the talk didn’t seem to bother the bespectacled Nedoroscik, who, as luck would have it, was scheduled to compete in the last of six rotations, and the last one in the lineup. This meant he waited 2.5 hours before it was his turn to ride the fist.
What Nedoroscik did to pass the time is now something internet legend. Photos of him with his to go back, closed eyesIt is apparently dozing to have become a meme. But Nedoroscik was in full preparation mode.
“I did my breathing exercises and I could hear all the guys cheering for [teammates] Brody [Malone] and Paul [Juda], and I thought, ‘It looks like everything is going well,’” he said. “I knew at that moment that every guy nailed every routine. And I got this thing, if everybody crashes [their routines] before me, so I never fail. So I thought ‘let’s go out there and do what we want’.”
And he did what he did, swinging, swinging and swinging some more to put, as he called it, “an exclamation point” on the competition.
It will surprise absolutely no one that Nedoroscik, an electrical engineering graduate from Penn State, is highly superstitious. He used to wear glasses that were part of a competition superstition after a friend gifted them to him and he used them as a joke – but he successfully completed a difficult routine. He avoids songs he listened to before he had a bad routine—“Thunder” and “Riptide” are the big ones (sorry, Imagine Dragons and Vance Joy). Since the 2021 world championship, however, he has been trying to free himself from these rituals by indulging in them to “break the curses”.
Ironically, when it comes to his career, Nedoroscik has been more laissez-faire. He focused on pommel horse after 2014, when a trainer who had trained the national pommel horse champion the previous year came to his club’s gym in Worcester and told him that one day he too could be national champion.
“I thought this guy saw a national champion, so he must see something in me,” Nedoroscik said. “That year I won my first junior national title. I had no idea how gymnastics worked and I didn’t even know that college was for gymnasts. So I started talking to coaches and ended up at Penn State. I didn’t know how to get into the national team, but I won the Winter Cup one year and then I made the national team. I thought, ‘man [being a specialist] It’s incredible’!”
He went from recreational gymnast to national and world champion and now to Olympic medalist. And emerging internet star.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
