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Stoughton’s Frederick Richard and Worcester’s Stephen Nedoroscik qualified for the five-man U.S. team.

By Amin Touri, The Boston Globe

July 8, 2024 | 9:54 AM

It’s been 16 years since the United States men’s gymnastics teams has made an Olympic podium, and if that trend is going to change this summer in Paris, the Bay State’s best will be front and center.

Two Massachusetts men are making the trip to France, with Stoughton’s Frederick Richard and Worcester’s Stephen Nedoroscik having qualified for the five-man team at last week’s Olympic trials.

“I’m an Olympian. It’s crazy,” Richard said, after he earned automatic qualification as the overall points leader. “I honestly felt like surviving the practice and training up to this point was the win, and so when I came here I already knew I was going to win, because I trained super hard for it.”

Richard, a junior at the University of Michigan, has been steadily ascending to the top of men’s gymnastics. He competed at his first US national championships at just 15 years old back in 2019, and he won Junior Pan American all-around titles in 2021 and ‘22. He dominated collegiate competition as a freshman in 2023, taking gold in the all-around, parallel bars, and high bar.

Then came the real proof that Richard was among the world’s best, when he claimed the bronze medal in the all-around at the 2023 world championships. In the team competition, the United States needed the routine of Richard’s life on the high bar to reach the podium for the first time since 2014. The 19-year-old delivered.

“So many things were going through my head, and mostly it was all the important people in my life,” Richard said after securing a team medal. “My friends and family back home, my mom and dad, my old coaches who came to this meet just to watch me, my coaches at Michigan, [my teammates], I saw them standing on the side, and I said, ‘I have to put it down for them.’

“That dismount . . . I lost a year of my life just giving into that stick.”

That performance in Antwerp made Richard the youngest American man to win a world championship medal. Still just 20, he isn’t a rising star anymore; after topping the all-around at the US trials, he’s an Olympic medal favorite.

“You can expect from me and the team some medals at Paris,” Richards said at the trials. “Our team is coming home with medals.”

Anyone who watched Richard and the American men at last fall’s world championships knows how much he revels in the team competition — “I did it for you boys,” he told his teammates after that clutch high bar routine — and for the United States to claim its first men’s team medal since 2008, Richard will need help.

He should get plenty from Nedoroscik, who operates on the other end of the spectrum from all-around star Richard; Nedoroscik is a pommel horse specialist through and through.

Making the team for Paris was a redemptive moment for Nedoroscik, who narrowly missed out on the Tokyo Games in 2021. He nailed his second-day routine on at the trials but finished as runner-up over a two-day aggregate score to Ohio State’s Alec Yoder.

Nedoroscik, a former Penn State star, went back to work, claiming four consecutive national titles on the pommel horse from 2021-24. He was actually the runner-up again at the June trials to reigning NCAA champion Patrick Hoopes, but Nedoroscik’s brilliant performances throughout the year, and particularly a dominant showing at the US championships a few weeks earlier, earned him a spot for Paris.

“I was thinking about three-score averages,” Nedoroscik said after the trials. “Before the competition, for example, Hoopes, I thought about what he scored at USAs and I determined that if I messed up today he would have to get a 15.1 to tie my three-score average, so that was just kind of sitting in the back of my mind, eating me away, so I was like, ‘Dude, stop thinking about those things, this is gymnastics, just relax and enjoy the moment.’

“It’s surreal. I looked at this [group] and thought to myself, it’s going to be hard to make a team of five guys, I didn’t really think it was going to be possible. But I stuck in there, just with that dream alive, and did everything to make this team, and I did.”

The men’s gymnastics competition in Paris starts with qualifying rounds July 27, before the team final July 29. Richard and Nedoroscik will be joined by Brody Malone, Paul Juda, Asher Hong, and alternates Shane Wiskus and Khoi Young.

Following their journey will be easy thanks to Richard’s social media presence; he has more than 670,000 followers on TikTok and another 184,000 subscribers on YouTube as he documents the road to Paris.

After the team final, Richard will have just two days to prepare for the men’s all-around final July 31, where he’ll look to become the first American man to win since Danell Leyva in 2012.