Georgian Brody Malone helps US men’s gymnastics break 16-year drought with a team bronze

July 29th, 2024

Brody Malone, of Summerville, Georgia, performs on the parallel bars during the men's artistic gymnastics team finals round at Bercy Arena at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Monday, July 29, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

The moment that Stephen Nedoroscik’s feet touched the floor — one last perfect landing in the final routine of the night — the U.S. men’s gymnastics team exploded 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.

The U.S. men were nearly flawless in the team final, 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. The team members, by their own admission, had failed to live up to expectations.

It was the team’s only returning Olympian, Brody Malone, who’d had the worst performance on Saturday. He 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.

“It wasn’t the best day,” Malone said Saturday after the competition. “We left a lot on the table — well, I left a lot on the table.”

On Monday, Malone was the hero. He, like the rest of the team, finished the night without a major error. His improvement alone was worth about 2.5 extra points for the United States.

Alongside Nedoroscik and Malone were Asher Hong, Paul Juda and Frederick Richard, the 20-year-old TikTok star who claimed the bronze. Japan took gold and China won silver.

It has been a long journey back to the podium for the U.S. men’s gymnastics. To compete on the international stage required a sea change in the way the men’s team approached 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.”

The program’s long-term strategy has its eyes set even further ahead, to the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

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.

Two U.S. gymnasts, Richard and Juda, will participate in the men’s individual all-around final, which will 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 15.2 during qualifying rounds tied for the highest of that apparatus, will compete in the pommel horse final on Saturday.