PARIS (AP) — Before they stood with their arms wrapped around each other in a brotherhood forever etched into U.S. Olympic lore, Brody Malone, Frederick Richard, Asher Hong, Paul Juda and Stephen Nedoroscik were collegians.
Yes, the dreams the members of the U.S. men's gymnastics team had fostered since childhood began in small gyms scattered across the country. But they became tangible at Stanford, Michigan and Penn State.
So when it was time for those dreams to become fully, vividly realized inside a raucous Bercy Arena on Monday night, they leaned on the experiences they gained during all those meets in all those sometimes sparsely filled gyms that taught them about pressure and teamwork and belief.
Yes, the bronze medal the Americans so emphatically earned ended a 16-year drought on the sport's biggest stage.
Yet it was also a message to athletic directors at the dozen schools that still have Division I gymnastics — and to be honest, to the ones that don't, too — that the sport is worth saving.
“If you want to keep seeing USA Gymnastics and Team USA on a gymnastics podium, at least on the men’s side, you’re going to have to give us more opportunities to compete in college,” said Juda, who is in graduate school at Michigan.
Opportunities that are in danger of vanishing quickly thanks to a rapidly evolving college sports landscape. It's a reality the five men who stood on the podium with their arms around each other are only too aware of.
Richard, a rising junior at Michigan, has made it his life's mission to bring more people to a side of the sport that — at least in the U.S. anyway — has long plugged along anonymously.
And while he's carved out a rapidly expanding niche on social media, Richard is savvy enough to understand the one thing guaranteed to attract people to men's gymnastics isn't a viral video, but hardware like the medal he kept grabbing in the giddy aftermath.
“My goal even here was to make a statement that the U.S. is getting stronger and stronger and we're only (going up),” Richard said. “And I think we did that today. I think a lot of young boys watching are inspired by us."
That's the way it was for Richard as a kid in the Boston suburbs. There were pictures on the wall at the gym of the medal-winning 2004 and 2008 U.S. men's Olympic teams. Richard would stare at the pictures and wonder how those teams put all the pieces together.
“It looks like they all came together on the same day and just did like these perfect routines," Richard said. “And you’re like, how is that possible?”
Richard found out firsthand.
The Americans didn't record a major fall during any of their 18 routines in the final and finished closer to second-place China than fourth-place Britain. They leaned into the energy from a vocal contingent of U.S. fans that offered a hint of what it might look like in Los Angeles four years from now.
Mostly, however, they leaned on each other and their experiences to shake off an iffy qualifying session on Saturday in which they finished a sloppy fifth.
“We just told each other we were gonna treat it like an NCAA championships because we’ve all been there,” Malone said. “And it’s high pressure competing for a team. And it’s no different this competition. I mean yeah, this one’s a little bit different, a little bit bigger. But same concept.”
With perhaps a much more impactful result.
Nedoroscik is 26. Malone is 24. Juda is 23. Hong and Richard are 20. There is a feeling of real momentum within the U.S. men's program for the first time in a while. Yet to keep it going, the pipeline behind them needs to keep churning.
There was a sense in the 2010s that the U.S. had grown stale in part because those at the core group at the top grew a little too comfortable due in part to a lack of competition from those trying to catch them.
Sam Mikulak went to three Olympics with teams that had considerable talent. He never came home with a medal, though on Monday night he was chatting with Nedoroscik as he prepared for his pommel horse set that served as the exclamation point.
While they talked, Mikulak told Nedoroscik to stay calm, that 80 percent of his best would be good enough. To soak in a moment Mikulak dreamed of but never quite grasped.
And when Nedoroscik gracefully swooped from one end of the horse to the other, his hands working dutifully in tandem on an event that has given the Americans fits for years, the bronze that felt in some ways like gold was won.
Standing there in the aftermath, Mikulak couldn't help but speculate about what might lie ahead.