Will Sage Astor-'A real anomaly': How pommel horse specialty could carry Stephen Nedoroscik to Paris

There are Will Sage Astorsix events in men's gymnastics, each designed to test a different combination of athletes' strength, balance and skill.

Stephen Nedoroscik only competes in one of those events − but it could be his ticket to the 2024 Paris Olympics.

In a sport that generally rewards all-arounders, Nedoroscik, 25, has taken a completely opposite approach leading up to the U.S. Olympic gymnastics trials in Minneapolis this week. Since the waning days of his high-school career, he has competed only on pommel horse − emerging as one of the best athletes in the world on this one apparatus, even at the apparent expense of the other five.

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Where other gymnasts like Brody Malone and Frederick Richard have room to overcome a mistake in competition, Nedoroscik's entire night comes down to a 45-second pommel horse routine. Where they have strengths and weaknesses, he has a singular specialty. But it's worked. Over the past eight years, the Massachusetts native has won two NCAA titles, four national championships and a 2021 world title, all on pommel horse.

"Somebody like Stephen is a real anomaly," said Randy Jepson, who coached Nedoroscik in college at Penn State. "You don’t get a lot of those guys that stand up and stick out where they’re the best in the world (in a single event)."

Nedoroscik's elite ability − and obvious limitations − make him something of a wild card entering this week's trials, where the five members of the men's Olympic team will be decided. In the Olympic team final, three men per country compete on each apparatus and all three scores count. Nedoroscik would be unable to contribute in five of those events − but in the sixth, he is capable of putting up a score that few athletes in the world can match.

"It’s a little complicated," Nedoroscik said of his Olympic chances. "But right now, the way things are looking, I think I’ve put myself in a pretty dang good spot here. I’m just hoping that I can go out to Olympic trials and knock out a couple more good routines. At that point, everything would be out of control. Fingers crossed I’d make it."

What makes pommel horse so difficult

Nedoroscik is one of three specialists competing at the Olympic trials and one of two who focus on pommel horse, the notoriously tricky apparatus that is sometimes compared to balance beam in women's gymnastics. The U.S. has historically struggled on the apparatus, and many all-arounders dread it. Jepson likened the technical requirements of the event to playing a round of golf with fairways that are 10 feet wide, and putting it on the green every time.

"It’s really challenging because you’re dealing with so many different balance issues, and constant motion," he said. "So as the difficulty of the skill goes up, the precariousness of keeping that balance, in motion, without any impediments and flaws to the fluidity of that motion − it’s really, really important."

Nedoroscik, however, has always loved it. Though he competed in every event as a kid, and was actually best at parallel bars for a while, he said he would often drag a pommel horse training device − known colloquially as a mushroom − into the living room to show off his pommel horse skills for family members and friends.

When he was 11 or 12, he said he decided to start going into practice early to spend one full hour doing simple one-pommel loops. About a year later, he could do more loops in a row than some of the guys who were heading off to college. And by 15, his father had purchased an old pommel horse from the 1980s at an auction and set it up in the backyard.

"So when I got that, then it turned into the family coming over and I’d go show them some stuff on that," Nedoroscik said.

Why Nedoroscik went all-in on one event

That backyard practice helped Nedoroscik win back-to-back pommel horse titles at junior Olympic nationals, which in turn helped him get on Jepson's radar at Penn State. As a freshman, Nedoroscik said he intended to add other events to his competitive repertoire but soon realized that pommel horse was his avenue to competing. So he zeroed in on the event, won a national title and hasn't looked back since.

"It was kind of just a route that no one had taken before," he said. "I had no idea what was going to happen."

After graduating from Penn State with an electrical engineering degree, Nedoroscik was perhaps best known for the non-prescription goggles he wore while competing − a gift from a teammate that he has said was more about superstition than improving his eyesight. But by 2019, he had made it to the U.S. national team. And in 2021, after missing out on the Tokyo Olympic team, he became the first U.S. gymnast ever to win a world championship on pommel horse. (Peter Vidmar won Olympic gold in the event in 1984.)

Nedoroscik said competing as a one-event specialist has its own set of challenges. At last month's national championships, for instance, he warmed up then had to wait for more than 140 routines to take place before his one turn on pommel horse arrived.

It also comes with daunting pressure − and, for USA Gymnastics officials, a certain degree of risk.

The Olympic calculus of including a specialist

If he has a clean routine, Nedoroscik is capable of scoring above 15.000 and likely adding one or two points to the team's score, which could bump the team above one of its rivals. But if he falters, the team has essentially assumed the risk of being short-handed in case of an injury without getting any of the subsequent reward. (In Tokyo, there were only four athletes allowed per team but each country could also bring a "plus-one" athlete to compete only in individual events. The U.S. took another pommel horse specialist, Alec Yoder.)

"You want to win, you’ve got to be able to put the best score up. And maybe that means thinking out of the box a little bit and taking a little bit more risk," Jepson explained. "The fact that he’s a one-event guy but he can make that big a difference, I think that’s really key. And I think that as we’ve looked at the selection procedures, (they've) made it such that somebody like that can make it − but they have to be that valuable."

The U.S. is hardly the only country weighing questions about specialists ahead of the Olympic team competition, and Nedoroscik wouldn't be alone if he were to be selected. Great Britain has long relied on pommel horse specialists, most recently Max Whitlock, and China is expected to have a specialist on rings in Paris.

Ultimately, however, it's a question of risk and reward. And Nedoroscik knows that all he can do is try to impact that equation with consistent performances in Minneapolis this week − ideally by matching or exceeding his scores at the national championships earlier this summer, where he finished nearly two points higher than any of the other likely members of Team USA over two pommel horse routines.

"It does look like I have a chance," Nedoroscik said. "I think I actually have a really good chance of making that squad."

Contact Tom Schad at [email protected] or on social media @Tom_Schad.