Can the 2024 U.S. men’s gymnastics team save the sport?

Nothing can make the average Olympic fan fall in love with a sport they know nothing about.

I’ve been waiting to see Simone Biles, Suni Lee, and the rest of the ladies show off their skills at this year’s gymnastics trials in Milwaukee. Can we please get the men’s competition over with soon?

I, however, couldn’t take my eyes off the men’s team as they performed their moves. Yes, the men displayed tremendous strength and ability, but they also had a certain… energy?

I wasn’t the only one watching men’s gymnastics for the first time. The U.S. men’s gymnastics team wowed many people by winning a bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics. The athletes they underestimated or do not know much.

For decades, American women gymnasts have outperformed their male counterparts at the Olympics. But this week’s victory put the spotlight back on American men’s artistic gymnastics, ending a 16-year run in which other countries took over the podium.

Perhaps no one is better than “Mr. Kurama” — Stephen Nedoroscik, whose only event is the pommel horse, often appears in a meditative state in front of the camera, eyes closed behind Clark Kent-style glasses, while his teammates (Brody Malone, Frederick Richard, Asher Hong and Paul Juda) flex their muscles in their respective competitions.

They did their part, but to win a medal, Nedoroschik had to do his part. The glasses came off, Nedoroschik struck out perfectly, and the Internet went wild.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics was the last time the U.S. men’s gymnastics team won a medal, winning the first bronze medal in the team event for the U.S. “We believe that it definitely sparked interest in men’s gymnastics,” Justin Spring, a member of the winning team at the time, told Explain today. “That would be cool.”

But this momentum did not last long. After retiring, Spring became the head coach of the men’s gymnastics team at the University of Illinois. During his tenure, he found that American universities were cutting back on men’s gymnastics programs, which was a disturbing trend.

In the 1970s, more than 150 colleges offered men’s gymnastics programs. Today, only 12 Division I teams.

One culprit some observers point to is the need to comply with Title IX programs and balance budgets. (Title IX prohibits schools that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sex.) In this view, in order to achieve equality between male and female sports, schools tend to cut men’s sports such as swimming and diving, track and field, and gymnastics.

“Beyond the Olympics and NCAA scholarships, there are so few opportunities that it’s hard to keep kids in the sport,” said Lauren Hopkins, founder of the GymTernet blog. Today, let me explain.

How can a sport thrive and win medals if the medal counts are few?

Fred Richard, fresh off a bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics, has done a great job getting everyone’s attention back on the sport. “You know, we play a sport that doesn’t have that many viewers. You know, it’s a niche sport, especially on the men’s side,” Richard told Good Morning America before recreating a clip from his popular TikTok @frederickflips Somersault into the air and land on a pair of shorts.

The video is part of a steady stream of content that has helped him amass more than a million followers on the app and, men’s gymnastics fans hope, will inspire more boys to take up the sport.

In the 1940s and 1950s, every state high school had some boys gymnastics program. Today, Almost disappeared.

Spring said boys have to start training at a very young age. “From the age of 5, it requires discipline, focus, incredible strength and technical precision. I think that’s why it’s not a sport for everyone.”

The reality is that gymnasts—both men and women—often begin their Olympic journeys while they are still learning to read. 5 years old. Asher Hong’s parents told the Houston Chronicle He started striving for the Olympics when he was just six years old.

The majority of the 2024 men’s team are college athletes, including all of the athletes from the 2024 Paris Olympics who attend Stanford or the University of Michigan.

“Almost every collegiate institution is a small national training center,” Spring said. “You can’t supplement and support Olympic athletes better than a collegiate program. You have nutritionists. You have sports psychologists. You have multiple coaches.”

To get into college, you have to be a top student, and the pool of college admissions is shrinking. And for those who can’t afford college, you have to compete for limited scholarships.

“I think a lot of kids, once they get to 13, 14, 15, realize they can’t play at the level of the boys who are getting scholarships, and in their minds, there’s probably no reason to continue at that point,” said Hopkins of the GymTernet blog. “With all that extra effort and time put in, it’s easier for them to quit and go do something else that’s less strenuous. A lot of them go into diving or track and field because those sports have a better chance of getting accepted into college.”

Even worse, you could be an athlete at a college and still have your program canceled.

Sean Wiskus, a member of the U.S. 2020 Tokyo Olympic team and an alternate for this year’s Paris Olympics, is a senior at the University of Minnesota, where his team finished second in the NCAA Championships.

Then, the men’s gymnastics cut.

“I think first and foremost about the next generation and even the team members behind me, I think a lot about them as well.” Wiskus told Fox 9 Minneapolis“And they lose out on the opportunities that were available through these programs.”

Title IX, which has been blamed for the decline of men’s college gymnastics, requires colleges to ensure that the ratio of male and female athletes is roughly the same as the ratio of male and female students enrolled at the school.

Some schools have Get creative Although colleges had the choice of adding women’s sports or dropping some men’s sports, many chose the latter for budgetary reasons.

in a 60 minutes interview, “Every time there’s a recession, you protect the core business, which is football,” said Victoria Jackson, a historian at Arizona State University who specializes in the history of college sports. “That means other sports are at risk of being eliminated.”

Sports like football and basketball bring in hundreds of millions of dollars each year through ticket sales Television contracts. Men’s gymnastics simply doesn’t have that appeal. The men’s championship events have been canceled since the coronavirus outbreak.

Mike Burns, who served as the head coach of the University of Minnesota men’s gymnastics team for 17 years, told Vox that he’s not giving up.

“They pissed off this 62-year-old guy from Boston who teaches cartwheels for a living,” Burns said. “They really wished they hadn’t done it because it would have started a fight.”

Today, Minnesota men’s gymnastics is no longer a school sport, and Burns and other volunteers have spun off the 117-year-old program into a club sport supported by the school’s Office of Student Affairs.

In June 2024, they officially Kick Out They have been practicing here regularly since the 1930s, and now they have converted it into a diving training hall.

They had to work hard to create the nonprofit Friends of Minnesota Gymnastics, whose board of directors is made up of former alumni. Through donations and other fundraising events such as gymnastics competitions, Burns said the association raises about one-tenth of what the University of Minnesota provides each year. Students who previously trained at the university now have to drive 45 minutes to get to training sites.

“My only wish is to keep this program going,” Burns said. “I’m going to do everything in my power to make that happen.”

When asked about his thoughts on the new crop of Olympians in Paris, Burns mentioned that Fred Richard “brought me a confidence and a pride that I just love every time I see this kid.”

It’s things like this, he said, that make men’s gymnastics infectious. But he acknowledged that without the resources of state funding provided by powerhouses like China and Russia, the United States would have a long way to go to win silver and gold medals.

The fact is: Olympic medals bring a lot of attention, and attention is money. The question is whether this year’s athletes can maintain that advantage.