Rings Roundup Day 3: The Ballad of Pommel Horse Guy
POMMEL HORSE GUY POMMELED HARDER THAN ANYBODY HAS EVER POMMELED BEFORE!
There are too many Olympic events for you to watch. That’s why I’m recapping the Olympics in newsletter form every day, letting you know about the previous day’s best moments, whether they happened in handball or kayak slalom. (Especially if they happened in handball.) We’re ranking the best events of the previous day based on how many Olympic Rings they deserve.
Six Rings: Pommel Horse Guy
There are six apparatuses in men’s gymnastics. On the vault, the gymnasts soar and spin through the air. On the rings, they suspend their bodies in mid-air with mythical displays of strength. On the high bar, they risk everything on their ability on a split-second mid-air catch.
And then there is the pommel horse, a dull doofus device devoid of excitement. There will be no high-flying feats of athleticism on this cursed hunk of junk: Just low-speed spins and occasional weird leg swings. It is considered one of the hardest apparatuses, because the skills which make gymnasts so good on the floor and the vault are often useless on the pommel.
On Monday, Team USA’s hopes of winning a medal in the team gymnastics event for the first time since 2008 came down to the pommel horse. It was the moment Stephen Nedoroscik had been training for his whole life, and his teammates—and America—watched.
Nedoroscik is a pommel horse specialist. He used to try the other apparatuses too, but in high school he realized he was much better at pommel than everything else and devoted all his attention to the weirdest, least popular apparatus. It paid off. Nedoroscik won two national championships on pommel at Penn State, and won a gold medal at the 2021 world championship.
He is also an absolute nerd—a mechanical engineer who has spent his time in Paris mastering the Rubik’s Cube. He wears thick glasses, which would be a problem one of the apparatuses that requires jumping or flipping. Not on the pommel. “It’s all feeling,” he told the LA Times. “I see with my hands.”
Bringing a pommel specialist is a sensible strategy. It’s common to have an apparatus specialist in the team final—China brought Liu Yang, the 2020 rings gold medalist, just to do rings. And everybody sucks on the pommel. But it requires dedicating one of your five team slots to a single competitor—and it led to absurd drama.
The pommel horse was Team USA’s final apparatus of the day, meaning Pommel Horse Guy had to sit and do nothing for three hours while his teammates put Team USA in position to medal. The stakes were clear: If Pommel Horse Guy delivered a clean routine, the team would achieve something it hadn’t done in 16 years. If he slipped or fell, they’d be in trouble.
It was impossible to tell whether Pommel Horse was built for the moment or whether he’d crack. The camera repeatedly cut to Nedoroscik on the sideline, and he was completely emotionless every single time—not stressed, not focused, just kinda there. At one point the camera caught him with his eyes closed—the announcers said he was “visualizing his routine” but he kinda looked like a kid who had fallen asleep in the back of a boring chemistry lecture.
And then, two of his teammates did their pommel routines, saving Nedoroscik for last. But when his time came… he removed his glasses like Clark Kent and nailed it. HE FREAKIN’ NAILED IT.
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He did all the slow arm spins! He did all the awkward leg swings! He didn’t fall off or slam his balls into the pommels. Nedoroscik scored a 14.866, the highest score by any American on any event all day long. His teammates lifted him up in the air; Nedoroscik raised his glasses.
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In fairness, we’re overhyping Nedoroscik a little. Team USA finished 2.2 points clear of Great Britain in fourth place. If he’d merely replicated the performances of his pommel-averse teammates, Team USA still would’ve won bronze comfortably. Great Britain’s Max Whitlock posted the highest score on the pommel; if Nedoroscik goes 14.866 again in the pommel final this weekend, it likely won’t be good enough to medal. This wasn’t his best.
But even if Pommel Horse Guy goes on to medal in the pommel, we’ll remember his performance in the team event more. There’s a reason we celebrate team medals at the Olympics more than individual ones, even though they’re worth the same amount in the medal count. There’s something powerful about coming together rather than thriving alone; something fascinating about figuring out which set of skills makes the best team. Sometimes, in life and in gymnastics, that team needs a Pommel Horse Guy. Cherish them.
Five Rings: The unstoppable Tom Pidcock
You can break Thomas Pidcock’s body or his bicycle and it doesn’t matter. He broke his collarbone in May of 2021; he came back and won the Olympic gold two months later anyway. And he was seemingly eliminated from medal contention in Monday’s mountain bike race when a mechanical issue forced him to give up the lead—but an hour of thrilling, maniacal racing allowed him to defend his gold.
Pidcock is a biking freak. He won a Tour de France stage that finished atop the Alpe D’Huez, and while his climbing is exceptional, he’s famous for his daredevil descents—skills learned on mountain bike courses, where riders wind through the woods at top speeds. Mountain bike courses force riders to pedal over dirt and jumps and trees and rocks—the sort of stuff which might cause a bicycle tire to pop. Well, that’s what happened to Pidcock. His front tire suffered a puncture sometime in the fourth lap while he was in the lead. There are no mechanics out on the course, so Pidcock had to finish the lap on his flat and come in for a pit stop. He was oddly calm while the mechanic was swapping out his tire, a brutal delay which surely should have ended his medal contention. He knew what came next.
By the time Pidcock got back on his bike, he was 40 seconds behind the leader, France’s Victor Koretzky. But he steadily cut into that lead and caught Koretzky on the final lap. On the last woods section of the race, just a few hundred meters from the finish line, Pidcock took the long way around a tree and slingshotted in front of Koretzky, causing their bikes to collide, knocking Koretzky off balance and sending Pidcock to the line uncontested. (Rubbin’ is racin’!) The French crowd booed Pidcock for defeating their hero as he crossed the line—maybe some day they’ll realize they got to watch a cycling god at his most powerful.
Four Rings: A Chill-Clutch Combo
The skateboarding street event ends with a format other Olympic events are too cowardly to attempt: A trick-off. The skaters start the competition with a 45-second long run, but end it with five attempts to complete two tricks, each of which is worth as many points as the full run. Every sport should have this! What’s the coolest thing a figure skater could do if they didn’t have to do a full routine? Why don’t we have an Olympic dunk contest?
Monday,'the trick-off went as perfectly as possible. Team USA seemed to have a gold-silver finish wrapped up, with Jagger Eaton and Nyjah Huston on top of the podium. Defending gold medalist Yuto Horigome needed to throw down a 96.98—higher than any trick on the day or in the 2020 Olympics—to win.A fter missing three straight attempts, Horigome had an all-or-nothing fifth attempt: If he landed the best trick of all time, he’d win, but if he missed, he’d score a zero and have no shot of reaching the podium.
And he did it! Horigome attempted a nollie 270 to nosebluntside (according to ESPN, I just copypasted that) and absolutely stomped it:
“When he made that, all I thought was: Shit,” said Jagger Eaton. Horigome got a 97.08, putting him .1 points clear to win gold. It was so cool I’m not even suspicious about the judges giving Horigome exactly the total he needed to win.
Three Rings: Another shootoff! In shooting!
Remember how yesterday I freaked out about a South Korea-China archery final which was decided by a shoot off which required an official to inspect an arrow with a magnifying glass to determine who won? Well, on Monday, another South Korea-China gold medal final was decided by a shootoff—and this one was decided by an even smaller margin.
In the final of the women’s 10-meter air rifle, 16-year old Ban Hyojin from South Korea and 17-year old Huang Yuting from China tied with an Olympic record of 251.8. That meant they went to a single shot to decide the gold—while shoot-offs are somewhat common in archery, they never happen in shooting, which has a much more precise scoring system. On the final shot, Huang scored 10.3 while Ban scored 10.4 to win the gold medal.
Okay, those are just random numbers in a scoring system you know nothing about. The final shots looked like this:
It’s almost impossible to tell who won—and that image has been blown up massively to make it easier to see. (Luckily, the scoring system is accurate down to .001 millimeters—no need to bring out a guy with a magnifying glass.)
Rifles are incredibly accurate, and 10 meters is the shortest competitive shooting distance. So the target in Olympic 10 meter air rifle is 4.55 centimeters wide—literally two inches—and the bullseye in the center is half a millimeter. (500 micrometers, for metric system fans.) The maximum possible score is 10.9, and competitors are docked .1 points for every .25 millimeters away from the bullseye.
So when the final scores in the shootout were 10.4 and 10.3, that means one shooter missed by 1.5 millimeters and the other missed by 1.25 millimeters—a difference of a quarter of a millimeter. Consider that the tip of a needle is about a millimeter, and the Olympic gold medal was decided by a distance about a quarter of that size. So between the archery and shooting, South Korea got two golds over China smaller than the size of the period in this sentence.
Two Rings: Fencing scoring
Let’s switch from the most precise scoring system possible to one where judges can basically just decide which points count and which don’t: fencing. I’m exaggerating slightly, but even though fencers are hooked up to an electronic scoring system that detects touches with incredible accuracy, judges have the power to interpret every point however they see fit.
That happened over and over again in the men’s foil final between Hong Kong’s Ka Long Cheung and Italy’s Filippo Macchi. The two fencers wound up tied at 14-14 in a match to 15, setting up a winner-take-all point for the gold medal. They had to replay that point three times as a referee spent an agonizingly long stretch of time examining video reviews.
Foil fencing is governed by complex rules which give one fencer “right-of-way” in certain moments and give some attacks priority over other attacks. I am not going to try to explain it, which I think is fine, because when some épée fencers tried to explain the differences between the different swords swords worked at the USA fencing media day in April, they got to this point and were like “honestly it’s not our job to understand that” and moved on. And even if you do understand the rules fully in hypothetical form, we’re talking about split-second movements that kinda look alike and are open to the judge’s interpretation. Every point is a block-charge call.
On the first two attempts at 14-14, the official went to video review and decided neither athlete scored. On the third, he went to video review and decided Cheung scored, giving him a second consecutive gold medal. It’s just the fourth gold medal ever for Hong Kong, and the second at these Olympics—both by fencers in extremely dramatic fashion.
The people on fencing reddit seem to think Macchi could have been given on the first point, but that Cheung clearly won the third. The people in the Italian fencing organization are less chill about it. They have filed a complaint about the ruling and his coach announced that Macchi was “the moral winner.”
The president of the Italian Olympic federation implied that Asian favoritism was responsible for the rulings, saying that If you have referees which you draw, the first is from [South] Korea, the second from [Chinese] Taipei, you need to change them... “Find me another sport in the world where you can have referees who come from regions close to one of the countries in action.” Sir. Brother. Bro. My guy, they do not get along like that just because they are from the same continent. They play the Chinese national anthem after competitors from Hong Kong (according to the Olympics, “Hong Kong, China” win gold medals. Do you know why someone representing Taiwan might not like that?
THAT SAID, fencing judging is very literally extremely corrupt without alleging that the entire continent of Asia is coordinating to Do A Racism, and the sport leaves so much in the hands of judges with such vague rules that it almost makes you wonder why the fencers even bother.
One Ring: A New Table Tennis fan
The Olympics bring together thousands of elite athletes from every sport from all across the globe, which is great for the athletes for two reasons, one of which is wholesome. In this post, we’ll focus on the wholesome one.
Anthony Edwards has been bragging to Team USA about his abilities in ping-pong, perhaps not realizing that he was headed to a place where he’d meet the best ping-pong players in the world. At the opening ceremony, Steph Curry shepherded the USA women’s table tennis team over to meet Edwards, who remained confident he’d be able to score at least a point off of them.
Edwards apparently decided he wanted to see just how good our ping-pongers are: He went down to the table tennis venue to cheer on Team USA’s Lily Zhang in her third-round match against Brazil’s Bruna Takahashi.
There is simply no other scenario in the world in which one of the world’s best basketball players would take an evening to go watch high-level table tennis. I remember going to the table tennis venue on my first night covering the Rio Olympics and simply being blown away by the talent, athleticism, and precision on display—a testament to how athletic brilliance can make even the most mundane game seem magnificent. I hope Edwards felt some of the same.
Zhang won, putting her into the round of 16, so her matchup with Edwards is delayed with a few more days.
A gazillion rings for US women's rugby