PARIS — Brodie Malone didn’t spend much time reflecting on his disastrous performance in qualifying for the 2024 Paris Olympics on Saturday, nor did he expend much energy analyzing his mistakes.
“I’ll just forget it,” he said, and moved on to the next thing.
And in the next scene, Malone was back to his normal self.
In the team final, the U.S. men’s gymnastics team made no major mistakes, leading them to their first Olympic medal in men’s gymnastics since 2008, but the biggest factor was the return of Malone, who improved his individual score by 4.56 points from the preliminaries. Malone, the team’s only returning Olympic athlete, improved his individual scores by 4.07 points across five events.
“Day one was a fluke for Brody. He’s not that kind of a guy,” USA Gymnastics men’s high performance director Brett McClure said. “I truly believed that if I told him, ‘Let’s compete in this meet. Let’s compete in this meet,’ I wouldn’t have to say anything. And he said, ‘Sure.’ As always, he turned things around.”
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Malone’s performance on Saturday was so bad, so shocking and so uncharacteristic that he felt he owed his teammates an apology afterward. He arrived in Paris with a realistic chance to win an individual medal. But he fell four times, including twice on the horizontal bar, his specialty event, and failed to even qualify for the 24-man individual all-around final.
“I think it was one of the worst games of my life,” the Stanford alum said, “but I knew I had the ability to go out there and hit what I normally do, so I just picked myself up and did my best for these guys today.”
Malone’s coach, Sheik Ceasar, said they had a conversation after Saturday’s match to hit the reset button. The reigning U.S. champion declined to go into details about the discussion, saying some of it was “pretty personal,” but said it helped.
Caesar suspects that Malone, the lone returning athlete on the 2021 Tokyo Olympic team, was trying to put too much pressure on his shoulders and was sweating the “little things” too much. He was the one who started the team group chat after the Olympic Trials and was clearly aware of the camaraderie and togetherness on the team outside of the gym.
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“To be a good teammate you have to take care of yourself, but he was a little too selfless,” Caesar said, “and I think his performance (Saturday) didn’t reflect how much of a team player he wanted to be.”
Sam Mikulak, his 2021 teammate and now one of his coaches, thought Malone “just needed some rest.”
“There are a lot of variables to consider,” Mikulak continued, “but I honestly think he just needed a little more time to get used to the environment.”
All of that, and Malone’s incredible return from a gruesome injury earlier this year, made Monday’s performance even more special. As a former college gymnast on a team of current and former college gymnasts, Malone said she tried to treat the meet as an NCAA championship meet — just any other competition.
The result was a huge improvement on the vault, a complete turnaround on the horizontal bar and, after her penultimate performance on the pommel horse, a fist-pumping explosion of joy.
“The Brody we saw out there is the Brody we know,” Caesar said, “so I’m glad it worked out when it needed to.”
Although Malone did not qualify for the individual final, she said she would definitely stay in Paris to support her teammates.
McClure, who oversees the men’s program, said the next challenge will be to convince Malone, 24, to compete in the next Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.
“It’s not off the table yet,” Malone said. “We’ll see how it goes.”
Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on social media @Tom_Schad.
