The Best a Man Can Get
A tale of Olympic glory
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Stephen Nedoroscik came to the Olympics with exactly one job. While his teammates vaulted, tumbled, and swung spectacularly through the air, he closed his eyes and envisioned the single moment that would determine whether they brought home a team medal. He had a very particular set of skills. But they weren’t the skills people typically think of when they picture a gymnastics routine. That was about to change.
The pommel horse is a padded bench with two handlebars. A gymnast grips them while twirling himself over the bench in perpetual motion. He must keep his body perfectly extended the entire time, teeter-tottering from hand to hand with subtle, lightning-quick balance shifts. For at least thirty seconds, he becomes a human top. He can’t relax, he can’t stop, he can’t pause for even a fraction of a second.
Born with a combination of severe vision problems, Stephen has to take his glasses off every time he does the routine. Fortunately, he doesn’t need them. His hands know exactly what to do.
The moment he dismounted, he knew he had been flawless. The whole team hoisted him in the air, screaming themselves hoarse. “I don’t know what’s happening!” he shouted. “Did we do it?”
We had, in fact, done it, by which Stephen meant we had made it to the podium. For other male gymnasts, bronze would have been a failure. Even silver was a failure for China, who apologized to their fans for losing to Japan (a double humiliation). But for Team USA, who hadn’t won a medal since 2008, bronze was as good as gold.
Meanwhile, on Twitter, the memes around Stephen were just getting started. Since the invention of Olympics Twitter, there have been several viral Olympics Twitter moments that were rated the most wholesome, the most pure. But “pommel horse Clark Kent” left them all behind.
This wasn’t just his origin story though. It was the story of a team—a team so bonded, so whole-hearted, so in love with their sport, that the country couldn’t help falling in love with them.
For years, the Achilles heel for American men’s gymnastics had been our difficulty scores, the measure of how hard a routine is. That began to change as gymnasts were offered new bonus incentives to learn harder skills. By 2024, the talent was there. With Russia disqualified from contention because of the Ukraine War, we could finally give China and Japan a run for their money. It remained only to assemble the perfect team. An automatic spot would go to rising star Fred “Flips” Richard, the top all-around finisher at the U.S. trials. A computer then crunched the numbers and whirred out four more names: Brody Malone, Paul Juda, Asher Hong, and Stephen Nedoroscik.
Fred Richard was already doing flips in his mother’s womb. Both of his parents are immigrants—mother from the Dominican Republic, father from Haiti. Their family is large and tight knit. In Paris, the camera found Fred’s parents cheering him on in the stands, Dad going viral for a moment of ecstatic whooping. They sometimes watch the videos he makes as a TikTok influencer, although Mom wasn’t thrilled with a “stupid” stunt where he walked on a treadmill with his hands. Fred first started making videos during COVID, with nowhere else to put his teenage energy. He’s grown the hobby into a large channel and hopes he can launch a gymnastics revival for American men, who currently have only 15 college programs to choose from (by contrast with 87 for women). At 20, he’s just getting started.
Brody Malone is the team leader—stoic, quiet, speaking with a modest Georgia drawl. As a young boy, he excelled at rodeo riding until a fall shifted his path to gymnastics. But his gymnastics career also came close to ending in March of last year, when he fell off a high bar and blew out his knee. “I don’t know why You did this,” he remembers telling God as he lay on the stretcher, “but I guess it’s part of Your plan.” By then, he was used to praying this prayer. He was only twelve when his mother died of cancer. Less than ten years later, he would lose his stepmother too. Despite all of this, he is still openly Christian. As the team looked ahead to Paris, he posted a group picture to Instagram along with a reflection on his favorite psalm: “Not to us, Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.”
Brody’s father, John, talked about their relationship in a tender open video letter to his son. In Paris, John held his breath as he watched Brody finish the routine that had ended so disastrously last spring. When Brody stuck the landing perfectly, John looked up to heaven, then buried his head in his hands.
A month before the trials, Paul Juda was ready to give up his own Olympic dreams. As a first-generation American, the son of Polish immigrants, he would have loved to make his parents proud. They took their first leap to the States without even knowing the language. Paul’s father transferred his Polish electrician’s certification and joined the union. Every day he would rush straight from work, completely sweaty, to pick little Paul up from school. But at 23, after years of hard work and sacrifice, Paul believed he’d let his family down. He had talent, and he rarely made mistakes, but he didn’t think he had the “X factor.” He was already planning out life after gymnastics with his girlfriend, a gymnast herself. Fortunately, she had other plans for his life. After a proper scolding, he decided she was right.
When an interviewer asked Paul’s father how it felt to see his son on the podium, he answered in his gentle broken English that “I was feeling so…struggles, keep inside, I said what about him, how he’s feeling, he’s there! So I said Lord, forget about me. Forget me.”
Asher Hong is only 20, but he wears a necklace with the Chinese character for longevity. When he was six, his parents asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. His answer was immediate. “I want to be an athlete, and I want to win in the Olympics.” When he was in grade school, his mom taught him the acronym PVFP: Pray, visualize, focus, point your toes. His brothers are gymnasts too, but not on Asher’s level. To get himself in the zone before a routine, he imagines issuing a silent challenge to the judges. What are you gonna write on that paper? What are you gonna write on that paper? Nothing! Nothing! But for all his bravado, he’s a seasoned NCAA collegian, and he understands that when you’re part of a team, you are not the main character. In Paris, he quickly established himself as the hype man, out-screaming everyone during his teammates’ routines.
Then there was Nedoroscik, who couldn’t believe he was even on the team. A gymnast so niche he was unable to fill in anywhere else, he was definitely a gamble. Yet his high difficulty score on a routine where even the cream of our crop had repeatedly stumbled made him an indispensable asset. Every team member brought some skill on the horse, but at the end of the day, they needed someone guaranteed to deliver that one monster score when it counted most. If everyone else brought their A-game in the other events, it would be all they needed. Meanwhile, Stephen’s had a full life outside of gymnastics, earning an engineering degree and studying Rubik’s cube only somewhat less obsessively than he’s studied pommel horse. This is typical for “horse guys,” who have an entire quirky, nerdy subculture unto themselves. Like Paul Juda, Stephen also has Polish blood, and he’s named after his father’s father, a World War II veteran who lived to be 96 and only died last year. He says his signature ear tug was something he’d developed as a special signal to his “dziadzio” (“grandfather”) whenever he competed on TV. Now, it’s a signal “to everyone that I love.” Stephen’s gymnast girlfriend was the first to inform him he’d become a Twitter sensation. (She’s changed her username to “Ms. Pommel Horse” accordingly.)
After qualifying, Stephen recalled how everyone had always told him he would be an Olympian. “Back then, I was just a dorky little kid. And now look at me — I’m a dorky adult, going to the Olympics.”
A few years ago, there was a silly round of Discourse over an exceptionally dumb remake of the classic Gillette razor commercial from the 80s. The original ad had been an unabashed celebration of masculine beauty, excellence, and virtue. It showed images of men scaling the heights of their professions and marrying gorgeous women. It showed them embracing their fathers, then lovingly rearing their sons. Is it all rather too perfect? Well of course. It’s a commercial. But in its time, these were the aspirational goals: to succeed; to marry; to deliver to your sons the American dream that was delivered to you. This was the ideal. This was the best a man could get.
Somewhere in the intervening 40 years, Gillette forgot about all this stuff. By way of an “enlightened” update, they offered up an excruciating #MeToo struggle session, in which men solemnly stared into the camera and lectured everyone about the awfulness of toxic masculinity. It became the stuff of memes for five minutes, then was forgotten. (Interestingly, I see that Gillette UK suddenly seemed to remember what the brand used to be all about this year, with a new commercial far more in the spirit of the old.)
Thinking about this team, this story, that little jingle kept running through my head. Because in its own way, the story fulfils the original ad’s aspirational goals. It’s a quintessentially American success story about a quintessentially American team, made up of distinct, memorable characters. The phrase “Diversity is our strength” has become a cheap leftist nothing, but there are times and places when it actually means something, and the Olympics is one of them. The same team that had a place for Brody Malone also had a place for Stephen Nedoroscik, who may not fit the mold of 80s Gillette commercial manhood but embodies manhood in his own way, a way the little boys in his home gym all look up to.
It’s not a pure fairytale. There are threads of tragedy and disappointment here. There are literal stumbles, as most of the team either failed to qualify for the individual finals or made a disappointing finish. (Only Nedoroscik would capture a second medal for himself, another bronze.) Despite this, the story has all the things American men were once taught, in uncomplicated fashion, to value. It has faith. It has family, with mothers and fathers who stay married until death parts them. And it has the fulfillment not just of the American dream, but of the American immigrant dream. In the celebration footage, one can’t fail to be deeply moved by the moment when Jozef Juda reaches gently for Paul’s team medal, then puts it around his own neck, speechless with joy. In the parents’ interview I embedded above, Fred’s mother remembers how growing up poor in the Dominican Republic, she never dreamed she would one day mother an American Olympian. Paul’s mother beams, “This is it! I have an Olympian son, and I’m gonna be forever an Olympian mother. Forever and ever.”
Then there’s Stephen’s mother, examining his medal with voluble awe as he explains to her that it has a piece of the Eiffel Tower embedded into it. “Steve,” she says, in her broad Bostonian, “this thing is the most gorgeous piece of hahdware you ever got in your whole life.”
Or, she might have said, it was the best a man could get.
Just wonderful, Bethel!