The U.S. mens gymnastics team took on more difficulty. Will it work? -

PARIS — At the previous Olympics, the U.S. men’s gymnastics team hardly had a chance. Because of the low difficulty of its routines, even an extraordinary performance probably wouldn’t have been enough to earn a team medal. The athletes acknowledged that gloomy reality as soon as the competition in Tokyo concluded. Then the familiar finish became the impetus for change.

To vie for medals, the program had to reinvent itself.

“There was no way we were going to be able to get on the podium if we didn’t increase our difficulty,” said Brody Malone, the reigning all-around national champion and the lone returning Olympian on the Paris team. “It just wasn’t going to happen.”

For the Americans, fourth- and fifth-place finishes had become the norm, and they left Tokyo with zero medals. Over the past three years, the U.S. gymnasts have aggressively pushed to increase the difficulty of their routines, and they enter Monday’s team final seeking their first Olympic team medal since 2008.

The U.S. team qualified for the final in fifth place after Malone struggled on multiple apparatuses, casting doubt on whether this group will earn that breakthrough medal. The Americans’ potential, which is much greater than what they showed Saturday, offers some reassurance. China and Japan, a pair of powerhouse teams, are still far above the field, but the U.S. men could push past Britain and Ukraine by cleaning up the mistakes from the qualifying round. None of the scores from Saturday carry over to the team final.

The British men earned the third-best qualifying score with an excellent performance, but U.S. high performance director Brett McClure said, “I think if we put it all together, we’re right there with them.”

A podium finish would validate a years-long effort to catch up with the world’s best. The Americans haven’t fully closed the gap and the absence of Russia is a key reason the U.S. men have a realistic chance of landing in third, but a medal would prove the program has progressed.

Scores combine difficulty, which is open-ended and increases as routines become more complex, and execution, which starts with a perfect 10 and goes down with mistakes. At the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, the Americans missed out on medals after errors derailed their performances. Both times, they qualified to the final in medal position, then failed to deliver when it counted. So then the program emphasized consistency, and gymnasts gravitated toward easier routines they could reliably hit. The widening gap in difficulty quickly became glaring.

The program set out to reverse this trend by incentivizing athletes to attempt harder skills. Major competitions are the best judge of how well that plan has worked.

The Americans won a team bronze at the world championships last fall, their first medal in nearly a decade, and in the final, they earned a combined difficulty score that was just 2.4 points behind gold medalist Japan and less than a point behind silver medalist China — a massive improvement from the five-point disadvantage the U.S. men faced from 2018 to 2021. A fall incurs a one-point deduction, so that edge gave the other teams considerable room for error.

At the world championships in 2018, the U.S. men had the best execution in the field, but it didn’t matter because they were so far behind in difficulty. They finished fourth. Last year, the Americans showcased a more complex repertoire of routines and performed with execution that was nearly as strong as China and Japan. They won the bronze medal with nearly three points separating them from fourth-place Britain. Heading into the Paris Games, that performance proved an Olympic medal was possible.

“We broke the drought once,” said Paul Juda, one of three U.S. Olympic team members who competed at worlds last year. “We’ve got so many returners that are going to have the exact same mindset, and it’s way cooler to come back with a medal, that’s for sure.”

During the qualifying round in Paris, Japan (108.4) and China (108.3) had the highest difficulty scores based on the top three marks on each apparatus. The United States was farther behind at 104.2, but if the American gymnasts replicated their best performances from recent competitions, they could climb above 106.

The looming asterisk is that Russia, the reigning Olympic champion, was not at last year’s world championships and is not competing as a team in Paris. Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the International Gymnastics Federation banned Russia from competing at the events that determined which teams qualified for the Olympics. So if the United States repeats its showing from worlds and wins a bronze medal here, the unanswered question is whether the Americans will remain in medal contention whenever Russia returns to the field.

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“I’m a strong believer of all that matters is that competition that you’re at,” said Syque Caesar, the coach of two Olympic team members, Malone and Stephen Nedoroscik. “And if you’re not at that competition, it doesn’t matter. … Russia’s nonexistent to me. Right now in gymnastics, they’re a non-threat.”

A silver medal would remove doubt, but that seems unlikely unless China or Japan has major trouble.

When the U.S. program implemented a bonus system in 2022 — a radical plan that had the ability to significantly alter the results of competitions — the national team staff believed athletes needed an incentive to attempt harder elements. When gymnasts debut skills, they might do so with weaker execution, which brings down their score. The bonus points tilted the risk-vs.-reward calculus in favor of difficult routines. It gave gymnasts freedom to experiment without worrying as much about how low scores could hurt their chances of earning spots on the national team, which provide funding.

Two years ago, Frederick Richard, now a star of the Olympic team, had just learned a tricky release element on high bar. Usually, a gymnast might not opt to include such a new skill in his competitive set, but with the bonus system, Richard said the boost he received counteracted the risk of a one-point deduction for a fall. He performed the skill at the national championships and caught it both days of competition. It has been in his routine ever since.

“We really can push the envelope at times like that earlier in the quad,” Richard said. “And it shows now.”

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