Nedorosic’s coach, Sheik Ceasar, describes the 25-year-old as “quirky, funny and goofy” and someone who “dances to his own tune,” and Nedorosic can swing around on a pommel horse better than just about anyone on the planet.
And it took Nedorosic and 40 seconds of his athletic excellence to help the U.S. men’s gymnastics team win a landmark Olympic bronze medal. He’s in Paris for one reason and one reason only: the pommel horse. It’s his specialty, and he’s so good at it that he made the Olympic team ahead of his peers competing in all sports. Pundits had questioned whether he was the right man to round out the team, but with his bronze medal win in the team final on Monday, they’ll never have to worry about that again.
Nedorosic had nothing to do until it was all over. The pommel horse was the U.S. team’s final event, and he was the last athlete. He was in a sweatsuit, hands over his face, and screaming while his teammates performed. At one point, Nedorosic left the arena to practice on the pommel horse in a secluded warm-up gym. During that time, as other Americans performed spectacular routines, he estimates he replayed his own routine about 100 times.
“I do it all the time,” Nedorosic said of the visualizations, “and sometimes I think I go overboard, but how else can I use that white space?”
The NBC broadcast featured a countdown to Nedorosic’s pommel horse routine, and as his time approached, the camera caught him closing his eyes beneath his glasses and tilting his head back, making him something of a cult hero to the audience.
Such is the power of the Olympics: Spectators who can’t name the six artistic gymnastics events on the men’s gymnastics circuit are enthralled by the bespectacled pommel horse star who won a bronze medal.
Before the competition, Nedorosic posted a photo on social media of him solving the Rubik’s Cube in 9.321 seconds. “This is a good sign,” he wrote.
When Nedorosic’s turn finally came, the Americans were performing so well that he basically just had to avoid disaster, but the pommel horse is one of those events where disasters often happen: the athletes are constantly in motion, swinging their legs around the apparatus, supporting themselves with their hands, trying to keep rhythm.
Nedorosic performs difficult routines with high scoring limits, but she can struggle under pressure. She didn’t know the exact math, but she figured if she nailed her routine, the team would win a medal. With the long wait and the prize money, Nedorosic “probably felt more pressure than anybody else in the field tonight,” U.S. High Performance Director Brett McClure said.
Steven Nedorosik had to score big on the pommel horse for Team USA in his final rotation…
And he did it. 🤯
📺: NBC and Peacock pic.twitter.com/hkhiHpovyh
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) July 29, 2024
After finishing with a bang, a score more than enough for a comfortable third place finish, the celebrations were immediate. Nedorosic pumped his fist into the air, retrieved his glasses from a bucket of chalk, embraced one of his coaches and they both jumped up and down. His teammates swarmed around him, lifting him into the air before he could place the glasses back on his face.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he told his teammates. “Did we do it?”
Nedorosic is in Paris to perform the 40-second routine three times. He performed brilliantly in the preliminary rounds, sharing the top score among the competitors, and performed well again on Monday. He has a chance to win individual gold in Saturday’s individual final. But his status on the team has been criticized, and he knows it.
“I was very aware of that,” Nedorosic said, “I really wanted to be on the Olympic team and I knew there would be backlash. I’m a one-sport athlete compared to all these great all-around athletes, and I’m a great equestrian, but it’s hard to fit on a five-person team.”
The Paris team was built with medal goals in mind: The U.S. selection committee analyzed the results of national competitions and Olympic trials, and the quintet was designed to maximize potential points in team events with three athletes per apparatus, an approach that favored high-potential specialists like Nedorosic over stable all-rounders.
The selection procedure included a scenario in which the five-member team would be automatically determined without further discussion. If the five gymnasts who maximized the team score using the two different analytical approaches were the same, then that team would be determined. And that is exactly what happened: the committee did not select Nedorosic. A simple calculation gave him a spot.
At Nationals and Olympic Trials, Nedorosic delivered one outstanding routine, but the other three fell short, failing to perform all the difficult elements, sometimes on purpose and sometimes having to improvise mid-performance.
Adding a specialist to your team is risky — Nedorosic’s value depended on whether he could execute one routine — so he turned criticism into motivation.
“Everyone was worried he was going to hurt the team,” said Sam Mikulak, a three-time Olympian who helps Nedorosic. “And he [clinch] It happens in the end. It’s like a Cinderella story, a fairy tale ending.”
Mikulak said he was shocked but excited when he heard strangers on social media had hugged Nedorosic during the team final.
Nedorosic, who went largely unscouted in high school before attending Penn State, has been a top gymnast since the last Olympic cycle and was initially known as “the goggle guy” because he wore sports glasses while competing, before later removing them and explaining, “I don’t think I actually use my eyes on the pommel horse. It’s all by feel. I use my hands.”
He had a chance to compete in the Tokyo Olympics, especially because the U.S. team, in an unusual format, could bring along a four-person team plus one individual who wouldn’t be counted in the team’s total score. That individual role would have been best filled by a single-event specialist. But Nedorosic was eliminated in the preliminaries, and the U.S. team took another pommel horse specialist to Tokyo instead.
Later that year, Nedorosic competed at the World Championships, where she won gold on the pommel horse. The World Championships, held immediately following the Olympics, are the individual events only, and although Nedorosic earned a spot on the 2022 U.S. national team, she was unable to perform well in the team final.
Those mistakes overshadowed Nedorosic’s incredible ability. But earlier this year, he changed his mindset: He stopped focusing on winning and started thinking about a single skill. After his breakthrough performance at an international tournament in March, Mikulak asked him how he’d done it. Nedorosic explained that he’d simply focused on one element: the Russian flop.
So Nedrosik spoke with Mikulak just before the performance and told his coach: “This is just a Russian failure.”
He then produced the most important performance of his career and became a national horse riding hero.
