He's a specialist. He's here because he excels in one event: the pommel horse, a highly unstable apparatus where one wrong step can throw off a skater's rhythm and ruin their performance. And with just minutes left in Monday's final, Nedrosic had to perform to give the United States its first Olympic team medal since 2008. He hopped on the apparatus and began swinging, executing each element with fluidity, hands precise. The other skaters looked on with their arms around each other, but as soon as he dismounted, the celebrations began.
“Oh man, that's a memory that will live in my heart forever,” he said as Nedorosic's teammates lifted him off the ground.
Nedorosik did more than enough to win the bronze medal, scoring 257.793 points to secure the USA the bronze medal spot behind powerhouses Japan and China. In a sign of how far the U.S. has come since their fifth-place finish at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, the U.S. men finished less than two points behind gold medal-winning Japan with 259.594 points.
While the other top teams made mistakes, the United States was the exception. Silver medalists China had a big lead going into the final rotation, but Su Weide fell twice on the horizontal bar, dropping the team to second place. Meanwhile, the U.S. men landed all 18 of their routines on the night, and Nedrosic's crucial 40-second performance was a tribute to the work his teammates had done throughout the competition. They struggled in the qualifying rounds, but the U.S. men performed at their best when it mattered.
“We knew our capabilities, we believed in each other, we believed in ourselves and we believed this was going to be a great day,” U.S. High Performance Director Brett McClure said.
Entering the final rotation, the U.S. was in third place, about two points behind fourth-place Ukraine. The lead offered some comfort, but the results of the final three sets of pommel horse would determine whether the U.S. could win a coveted Olympic team medal.
Paul Judah, the team's most consistent athlete in the tournament, began the rotation with a solid performance. Brodie Malone, the team's lone Olympic returnee, had a disappointing performance in the preliminary round after falling on the pommel horse and struggling in other events. However, he rebounded to lead the team to the final event, where his performance helped Nedorosic to victory.
Nedorosic said he thought about his routine about 100 times throughout the night. Later in the competition, he left the arena and worked briefly in the warm-up gym, then performed, saluting the judges at the end. After Nedorosic landed and replaced his glasses on his face, teammates and coaches surrounded him. The hugs seemed endless. For the Americans, the breakthrough bronze medal meant just as much as the gold.
The U.S. men won the bronze medal at last fall's world championships, the first for the U.S. in nearly a decade, sparking optimism that the country could end its medal-less Olympic streak this year. There was an empty spot on the podium because Russia was unable to participate due to its invasion of Ukraine.
But the team's medal hopes seemed dim when the team finished fifth in the preliminary round, behind China and Japan as well as Great Britain and Ukraine, and was more than three points behind third-place Great Britain, due in large part to Malone's errors.
The U.S. couldn't rely on a simple routine in the hopes of winning a medal with a pretty routine: they had to maximize their difficulty score. and It was a wonderful performance. In the finals, they showed one amazing performance after another.
The U.S. men kicked off with Judah landing a perfect double-and-a-half-revolution vault that had the crowd so excited they ran off the podium afterward. Malone landed another vault, and chants of “USA” rang out around the arena. Asher Hong then rounded out the lineup with the team's most difficult and powerful vault. For the third event, the chants rang out again, louder and longer this time, and the Americans pumped their fists in response.
“I think the atmosphere was 100 percent set on the vault,” said Nedorosic and Malone's coach, three-time Olympian Sam Mikulak. “From there, it was like, 'Wow, this is fun.'”
Malone led the comeback, with nearly every routine equaling or surpassing the team's previous performance. After two falls on the horizontal bar on Saturday, he had no trouble this time around with the difficult routine. Just before Malone, Frederic Richard delivered a high-flying routine as his teammate jumped in response to a successful release element and after he landed well on the floor. On that apparatus alone, the Americans improved their score by more than two points. And finally, they headed to the pommel horse with the medals in the cards.
This wasn't Nedorosic's first such moment: He was selected for the national team for the 2022 World Championships but underperformed in the team final. When Sieg Cezar began coaching Nedorosic shortly thereafter, he was eager to address Nedorosic's past failings head-on.
“We had to peel back the layers,” Caesar said, explaining how he worked to pinpoint what went wrong for Nedorosic at several key moments.
Nedorosic won gold at the 2021 world championships, but consistency has been a challenge to develop. Caesar said it took him more than a year to figure out what worked best for Nedorosic, and he added mental cues to help him handle different competitive situations. Caesar added “curveballs” to his practices. One example, Caesar described a few weeks ago, involved having Nedorosic sit for two hours and then hit a routine, a similar scenario to the one the 25-year-old Nedorosic faced Monday.
“He embraced the pressure and he embraced the curveball,” Caesar said.
Previously, if Cesar pressured him in practice, Nedorosic would respond: “You don't have to pressure me. I already pressure myself.” But now, he doesn't try to downplay the weight of the moment. Did he feel pressure in the team final? “Yeah, yeah,” he said. But he knows he can handle it. And here, in the biggest moment of his career, he proved it.
