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PARIS — For Stephen Nedoroscik, it's official: Solving his Rubik's cube in under 10 seconds the morning before he competes in the Olympic Games has now gone two-for-two as an omen of a medal to come.
You may know Nedoroscik as simply "Pommel Horse Guy," if you are one of the many Americans he dazzled with his Clark Kent-style take-off-the-glasses-and-save-the-day heroics in the men's gymnastics team finals earlier this week, in which his pommel horse routine clinched a historic medal for the U.S.
On the morning of the team final, he'd solved a Rubik's cube in under ten seconds, declaring it a "good omen" in a post to his Instagram.
On Saturday, Nedoroscik did it again. "Good omen pt. 2," he wrote — then seven hours later, he won the bronze medal in the Olympic Games pommel horse final in Paris.
The Rubik's cube is a way of meditating and filling time on long competition days, he said. He used to worry that a quick solve was a foreboding sign, a warning that a poor performance would soon follow. "In the past, I was like, 'Oh my gosh, this is going to end up being the best thing I do today.' So it would kind of freak me out," he said.
That changed this week. "But after I solved it under 10 seconds before team finals, solving it again under 10 seconds today, I was like, 'All right, we got this,'" he said, laughing at a press conference afterward.
On Saturday, at Paris's Bercy Arena, Nedoroscik was one of eight men competing for the gold in this niche apparatus that is so often a weakness for other strong all-around gymnasts.
Before he began, he removed the glasses that endeared him to so many, and he hooked them over the rim of the chalk bowl. Then came his routine, some 40 seconds of mesmerizing swings of his legs in circles around the horse, with one-handed twirls on the handles and walks up and down the apparatus.
During the qualification round last weekend, Nedoroscik had tied for highest score, lifting hopes of a gold medal in the final.
But some competitors performed more challenging routines on Saturday, including Ireland's Rhys McClenaghan, who won the event at last year's World Championships and again took the gold on Saturday, with a score of 15.533. Nariman Kurbanov of Kazakhstan won silver.
In the end, Nedoroscik's score of 15.3 won him bronze. Nedoroscik was the only American male gymnast to qualify for an apparatus final.
In the lineup of eight, Nedoroscik went fifth, after McClenaghan. Nedoroscik chose not to watch any competitors or look at any scores before his turn.
Instead, he said, he decided to perform his usual routine, no matter the circumstances, rather than switch to a more difficult routine. "I played around with upgrades yesterday, and it just didn't feel like it was going that well," Nedoroscik said, adding that he has been dealing with stress injuries.
That meant his chances of eclipsing McClenaghan's high score were slim.
"I really didn't know what he scored, and I didn't know what I had to get," Nedoroscik said. "But landing on the ground and seeing his absolutely huge score, I was like, 'I don't think I've done enough, but wow, that is amazing for Rhys.'"
Afterward, McClenaghan pulled Nedoroscik in for a hug. "I was nervous watching you, because you can do any routine," McClenaghan said at the press conference, turning to face Nedoroscik. "He can do huge difficulty and pull it off when it matters."
Nedoroscik, a pommel horse specialist, was selected to the U.S. men's gymnastics team to bolster what officials viewed as a relative weakness for the rest of the squad.
The attention he's drawn over the past week for his performances has been both fun and distracting, he said.
"I've just been consistently on top of the world for the past week now," Nedoroscik said. "I literally had to go and turn off my notifications yesterday because I needed to be able to lock in for this competition."
In the team final, the U.S. had been assigned to the pommel horse for its very last rotation. And Nedoroscik went last — meaning it was his routine that clinched the bronze for the U.S., the first team medal the country had won in 16 years.
But until then, he had to wait as his teammates performed on the other five events; in its broadcast, NBC even included a countdown timer, showing the hour-and-then-some that Nedoroscik had sit on the sidelines.
When he landed his routine, his teammates burst into joyous cheers and lifted him onto their shoulders. "It was just the greatest moment of my life, I think, and I am so happy to have been there," Nedoroscik said.
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