Team USA’s Stephen Nedoroscik Is an Internet—and Gymnastics—Hero

The name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue—Stephen Nedoroscik—but you can just call him The Pommel Horse guy.

That’s what social media is dubbing their newly minted star.

It’s Nedoroscik’s specialty in gymnastics, and the sole reason he was put on the U.S. men’s team. The Massachusetts native now trains in Florida, and is a four-time U.S., two-time NCAA, and 2021 world champion on the event.

Pommel horse? What’s that? That’s the event in which gymnasts mount—yes, mount—what’s called a horse that is 160-cm. long and 135-cm. wide with two handles on top. You grab the handles and swing your legs around in creative ways—around, above, and next to the horse. You can even move from one end of the horse to the other—a move that Nedoroscik does especially well.

Read More: How the U.S. Men’s Gymnastics Team Won Their First Medal in 16 Years

Nedoroscik was put on the five-member U.S. Olympic team because he’s so good on that event. His selection came as a surprise to many gymnastics fans, who questioned the sanity of USA Gymnastics in banking on a specialist who competes on only one of the six events in men’s gymnastics. What if he makes a mistake? What if other gymnasts on the team get injured and you run out of alternates to replace them? A specialist, in the gymnastics world, is therefore a very risky thing to be.

That doesn't mean it hasn't happened before. It has, and at the Olympics, on the women's team in 2012 when vault specialist McKayla Maroney performed a spectacular vault and then turned into team cheerleader for the rest of the meet.

The pressure inherent in being a specialist and all the chatter didn’t seem to bother the bespectacled Nedoroscik, who, as luck would have it, was scheduled to compete in the last of six rotations, and last in the lineup. That meant he waited for two and a half hours before it was his turn to mount that pommel.

What Nedoroscik did to while away the time is now stuff of internet legend. Snaps of him with his head back, eyes closed, and seemingly dozing have become a meme. But Nedoroscik was just in full preparation mode.

“I did my breathing exercises, and I could hear all the guys cheering for [teammates] Brody [Malone] and Paul [Juda], and I thought, ‘Sounds like everything is going well,’” he said. “I knew at that moment that every guy hit every single routine. And I have this thing, if everybody hits [their routines] before me, then I never miss. So I thought ‘let’s go out there and do our thing.’”

And do his thing he did, swinging, and swinging, and swinging some more to put, as he called it, “an exclamation point” on the competition. Given the gap of more than two points between the U.S. and the next team, from Great Britain, Nedoroscik would have had to have a disastrous pommel-horse routine to cost the U.S. a medal. Still, it was a clutch performance that added to the drama of the evening—and his popularity on social media as all eyes were on the guy who had nothing to do until the last few minutes of the competition.

It will surprise absolutely no one that Nedoroscik, an electrical-engineering graduate from Penn State, is highly superstitious. He used to wear goggles that were part of a competition superstition after a friend gifted them and he wore them as a prank—but successfully completed a hard routine. He steers clear of songs that he’s listened to before having a bad routine—“Thunder” and “Riptide” are big ones (sorry, Imagine Dragons and Vance Joy). Since the 2021 world championships, however, he’s been trying to rid himself of those rituals by indulging in them to “break the curses.”

Ironically, when it comes to his career, Nedoroscik has been more laissez-faire. He concentrated on pommel horse after 2014, when a coach who had trained the national pommel horse champion the previous year came to his club gym in Worcester and told him he could also be a national champion one day.

“I figured, this guy has seen a national champion so he must see something in me,” Nedoroscik said. “That year I won my first ever junior national title. I had no idea how gymnastics worked and didn’t even know that college was a thing for gymnasts. So I started talking to coaches and ended up at Penn State. I didn’t know how to get on the national team, but won the Winter Cup one year and then made the national team. I thought, ‘Dude [being a specialist] is awesome’!”

It’s taken him from recreational gymnast to national and world champion to, now, an Olympic medalist. And emerging internet star. The world will get another chance to indulge in Pommel Horse Guy mania on Saturday, when Nedoroscik competes in the event final.