The American men — hoping to repeat the bronze they won at the world championships last fall — weren't nearly as sharp as they would have liked in front of an audience that included U.S. First Lady Jill Biden, who clapped along with American star Frederick Richard's floor routine and posed for pictures with a somewhat subdued team afterward.
While Richard -- a native of Stoughton, Massachusetts -- called the experience “pretty sick,” he regretted not being able to show Biden a “cooler” routine after he scored a 13.833, a bit below what he knows he'll need to medal in the all-around finals next week.
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Richard wasn't the only one. The U.S. arrived in Paris hoping to earn a team medal at the Olympics for the first time since a bronze in Beijing 16 years ago. While that certainly remains on the table, Richard & Co. will need to be significantly better going forward after pommel horse specialist Stephen Nedoroscik -- a native of Worcester, Mass. -- became the only American to make an apparatus final.
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Brody Malone, who returned from a catastrophic leg injury in March 2023 to win the U.S. Championships in early June and make his second Olympic team, fell once on pommel horse and twice on high bar.
His second miscue on high bar — a high-risk, high-reward event in which Malone won gold at the 2022 world championships — forced the Americans to use Asher Hong's 12.600, one of the reasons the U.S. ended up 3.322 behind Britain.
“It was definitely not perfect,” U.S. high-performance director Brett McClure said. “And it was a few too many mistakes. I feel leading into team finals we need to clean some things up.”
