Before it was his turn to take center stage at the Paris Olympic Games, Stephen Nedoroscik leaned back and closed his eyes.
But the bespectacled Olympian wasn’t snoozing.
Nedoroscik, whose speciality is pommel horse and whose routine would decide whether the US men’s artistic gymnastics team would make it to the Olympic podium for the first time in 16 years, was tracing his steps in his head. He breathed slowly to lower his heart rate, he told Today.
When it was his turn, Nedoroscik ditched his glasses and Team USA jacket and headed to the pommel horse. And in a near-perfect 40-second routine of quickly swinging both legs around his body and flinging himself into a walking handstand, Nedoroscik secured the team’s bronze medal. His teammates’ reactions were as euphoric as they might have been if they’d won gold.
“I don’t know what’s happening, did we do it?” he asked his teammates after they hoisted him into the air, triumphant.
Though they won together, it’s Nedoroscik who’s broken out as the fan favorite, even with his limited performance time. He’s earning Clark Kent comparisons for the unassuming demeanor and similar specs he wears before losing both to become a confident pommel horse hero.
Nedoroscik, for his part, thinks the memes he’s inspired are “awesome.”
“I’m representing people who wear glasses well,” he said, beaming, in a Tuesday appearance on “Today.”
Here’s what to know about Nedoroscik, the US men’s gymnastics team’s very own Superman.
He’s Team USA’s pommel horse pro
While teammates like Brody Malone and Fred Richard flit between events like rings and vault, Nedoroscik only performs on one apparatus: pommel horse. He’s the first American gymnast to make the Olympic team as a specialist in a single event, according to his training gym, Evo Gymnastics in Sarasota, Florida.
He dropped the other events in artistic gymnastics seven year ago, he told USA Gymnastics, after winning two Junior Olympic National titles in pommel horse and joining Penn State’s men’s gymnastics program.
Specializing has succeeded: Commentators said that he’s perhaps the best in the world at what he does.
Nedoroscik, it seems, takes himself less seriously than he does his sport.
“I go internationally and I see all the other (pommel) horse specialists. It seems to be a universal thing that we’re quirky people that are kind of just fun,” he said.
He was a world champion before Paris
Nedoroscik and the US men’s gymnastics team earned a bronze medal in Paris, but on another world stage, he’s won gold.
At the 2021 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Kitakyushu, Japan, conditions were less than ideal for Nedoroscik to medal at all: The phenom had broken his hand.
It didn’t matter: Nedoroscik still came in first — the first time the US had ever earned a gold medal for pommel horse at a world championship.
Stateside, he’s been crowned the US pommel horse champion four times, tying the record for most pommel horse wins, per USA Gymnastics.
The Paris Games are Nedoroscik’s first Olympics — he missed the chance in 2020 after a disappointing performance in the Olympic trials.
“I messed up,” he told CNN affiliate WBBH in Fort Myers, Florida, ahead of this year’s Games. “I felt the pressure and kind of crumbled under it.”
But the blow didn’t keep him down for long. Nedoroscik decided to “redirect that energy immediately,” get back in the gym and keep training. He followed up those disappointing trials with his thrilling performance at the world championships, and since then, he’s kept on winning.
He’s a puzzle fiend
As if competing at the highest level of gymnastics weren’t enough, Nedoroscik is also an über-competitive puzzler. His personal record for solving a Rubik’s Cube is 8.6 seconds.
He took time off from “cubing,” though, after a particularly hard puzzle consumed his downtime. His gymnastics teammate Fred Richard turned him on to “killer sudoku,” a version of the puzzle that involves more math. Nedoroscik found a killer sudoku puzzle that claimed to be the “world’s hardest,” and after 45 hours of puzzling, he became the 43rd person in the world to solve it.
The experience nearly ruined the Rubik’s Cube for him, he said.
“I tried to get back into cubing, and it wasn’t the same,” he told USA Gymnastics ahead of the Olympics. “I was kind of lost.”
His cubing slump ended along with the US men’s gymnastics drought at the Olympics. He brought his trusty cube with him to Paris and solved it on the day of the team final in just over nine seconds.
“It’s stress relief,” he said on his Tuesday “Today” appearance. “Sometimes I make the excuse that it’s good for wrist rehab, too.”
He competes with an eye sensitivity
The specs are cool for Clark Kent comparisons, but without them, Nedoroscik wouldn’t be able to see his adoring crowd at the Olympics. Nedoroscik has strabismus, or crossed eyes, and has trouble seeing without them.
On “Today,” while wearing host Hoda Kotb’s borrowed Ray-Bans, Nedoroscik said that when he’s up on the pommel horse without his glasses, he depends not on sight but feel.
“I don’t even really see when I’m doing my gymnastics,” he said. “It’s all in the hands. I can feel everything.”
He hasn’t always competed with limited vision. Nedoroscik used to wear goggles on the pommel horse during his time at Penn State, but he said in June that he “hadn’t really felt like” wearing them on the Olympic stage.
He hinted that the new look may have had something to do with testing his own limits.
“Sometimes, I like to push the boundaries,” he said.
Pushing paid off in Paris. His kryptonite is not, it seems, the pressure of performing on the world’s biggest stage in sports.
He’ll have a brief break between the Olympics and his next venture: Swinging around the US with Simone Biles and some of his men’s gymnastics teammates on the Gold Over America tour. The pommel horse pro will take the stage beginning in September.
