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PARIS — The moment that Stephen Nedoroscik's feet touched the floor — one last perfect dismount in the final routine of a flawless night — the U.S. men's gymnastics team erupted in joy.
It didn't matter that the medal was bronze, not gold. The achievement was monumental all the same: the first team medal for U.S. men's gymnastics in the Olympics since 2008. Accordingly, there were plenty of hugs to go around.
"There's that one meme online where there's a guy on a podium popping champagne, biting the medal, taking all the pictures. And then they zoom out, and he's on third. But that's what it felt like today," said gymnast Paul Juda. "We ended the drought 16 years in the making, and I can't be happier for everybody."
The U.S. men were nearly perfect in the team final, which was held Monday before a crowd of nearly 15,000 people in Paris's Bercy Arena. The performance was a triumph after a disappointing fifth-place finish Saturday in the qualifying rounds, in which the Team USA gymnasts, by their own admission, had failed to live up to their expectations.
In fact, it was the team's only returning Olympian, Brody Malone, who'd had the worst performance on Saturday. Malone fell once on the pommel horse, then twice on the horizontal bar. The painful errors ultimately cost him a chance to compete for an individual all-around medal later this week.
But on Monday, Malone was the hero. He, like the rest of the team, finished the night without a major error. The crowd roared when he completed his horizontal bar routine without a fall. His improvement alone was worth about 2.5 extra points for the United States.
"You just got to forget about it," Malone said Monday. "It was over and done with. There's nothing I can do about it. I just had to focus on the next day, and that's what we did. And it ended up working out great."
Alongside Nedoroscik, Juda and Malone were Asher Hong and Frederick Richard, the 20-year-old TikTok star who also stepped up his performance on Monday night.
Richard had prepared a more difficult horizontal bar routine that he had intended to perform in an event final, but after he failed to qualify, he decided to deploy it Monday instead. "In our team meeting, the coaches said, 'You look amazing, do it," he said. "And it paid off."
Japan took gold and China won silver. Russia, a traditional powerhouse in men's gymnastics, did not field a team this year as the vast majority of its athletes were excluded from the Games over the country's war in Ukraine.
It has been a long journey back to the podium for the U.S. men's gymnastics. To be competitive on the international stage has required a sea change in the way the men's team designed their routines, which are scored for both the difficulty of what was attempted and the gymnast's execution.
"We were so far behind in difficulty," Brett McClure, the men's high performance director said last week. "I believe that this team's legacy is being able to close the gap in such a short amount of time." McClure was part of the 2004 Olympic team in Athens, where the U.S. men won a silver medal. At the next Olympics, in Beijing in 2008, the men won a bronze — their last team medal for 16 years.
Now, the program's long-term strategy has its eyes set even further ahead, to the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. "We're trending in the right direction," McClure said Monday. "If we want to get better and push for first place in L.A., then this is going to be extremely motivating."
"I think there's still a lot to be done," said Sam Mikulak, a three-time Olympian gymnast who is now a coach. "I'm sure they were up on that podium in third place and they were so happy, so grateful. But I think they were like, 'Man, it would be cool if we had our national anthem playing too.' So I think that bodes well for the future."
An hour after the medal ceremony, Richard said that the bronze still felt "unreal," but that he had already started to realize how historic their effort was.
"They used to have pictures in my gym of the past Olympic teams that medaled, and I always looked at that, like, 'Man, what if I was one of those people one day?' And now we are," Richard said.
Richard and Juda have just one day of rest before participating in the men's individual all-around final, which is set to take place Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time.
The only member of the team to qualify for an event final was Nedoroscik, whose score of 15.200 on pommel horse during qualifying rounds tied for first. He will compete in that final on Saturday.
Copyright 2024 NPR
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