In return to Penn State, Olympic medalist Stephen Nedoroscik talks about ‘unbelievable’ journey
In a visit back to his alma mater, Stephen Nedoroscik, the gymnast who captured America’s heart during the Summer Olympics as “Pommel Horse Guy,” told Penn State students gathered in the HUB’s Heritage Hall Thursday about his “unbelievable” past six months.
Penn State’s Student Programming Association “SPA Day” event was moderated by Penn State men’s gymnastics coach Randy Jepson, who coached Nedoroscik when he was a Nittany Lion in 2017-2020. Nedoroscik answered questions about his time in the Olympics, his journey to compete at and become a two-time NCAA national champion in the pommel horse, his love for Penn State and how he has overcome obstacles including ADHD, and strabismus and coloboma, which causes him to have a lack of depth perception and a high sensitivity to light.
Nedoroscik is a pommel horse specialist and only competes in that event. He has won several awards including the bronze medal at the 2024 Summer Olympics. He immediately went viral for being the nerdy-but-adorable gymnast with impressive pommel horse skills after he helped end the U.S. men’s gymnastics team’s 16-year medal drought and was dubbed Team USA’s “Clark Kent.”
Including Nedoroscik on the United States’ five-person men’s gymnastics team was initially criticized because he’s an event specialist, so if one person gets hurt during the competition, he can’t fill in the gaps and the team is in an “impossible situation,” he said.
“I had to deal with a lot of very negative comments. I mean, pretty much the entire gymnastics community was like, ‘we can’t have Stephen on the team.’ But for me, like, I kind of like the negative energy, I’m gonna be real. I was like, ‘I’m gonna prove them all wrong,’” Nedoroscik said. And that he did.
Nedoroscik was in Happy Valley with the Dancing With The Stars Live tour, which had a tour stop scheduled at the Bryce Jordan Center Thursday evening. Being on the 33rd season of “Dancing With The Stars” and placing fourth with dance partner Rylee Arnold is just one of the many opportunities that Nedoroscik has had since his quick rise to fame during the Paris Olympics.
After the U.S. men’s gymnastics team won the bronze medal, he was the only gymnast to be drug tested, he said, so he was late getting a celebratory dinner. After getting tested, he ran to dinner with his girlfriend and family. He recalled his girlfriend, Tess, asking, “have you looked at your phone yet?”
“I open it up and I’m trending on Twitter. It was unbelievable, unbelievable,” he said. “In that moment, I was like, ‘What is life? What is happening?’ I just got an Olympic medal, and suddenly all these followers, messages, positivity, and it was so black and white compared to what I had when I first made that Olympic team.”
Everything happened quickly from there. In fact, “Dancing With The Stars” reached out to him that week and asked him if he wanted to be on the show. They reached out on a Thursday, he said, and they wanted a decision by Friday.
“It was really just a crazy time of my life, and that Friday, I accepted the ‘Dancing With The Stars’ thing, which, first of all, no regrets. That was the best decision ever. But I had to turn all of it off. I said, ‘this is so distracting.’ I turned it all off and said, ‘I’m not looking back for the next couple of days,’ because I had that event final,” he said. “And I ended up at that event final, did a really good job in it. ... But I end up doing a amazing routine, probably my best routine of the quad, honestly, it was seriously, in my opinion, flawless. And I end up getting bronze medal for that performance as well, which is unbelievable. Two bronzes. What?”
But before all of that, he was a Penn Stater who studied electrical engineering, competed in gymnastics from 2017-2020 and won two national titles. The Massachusetts native went on a few unofficial visits to different colleges but immediately fell in love with Penn State’s campus because it made him feel “really warm and welcomed.” When he was making his decision, he asked his club coach which college would make him “the best pommel horse guy,” and his coach told him Penn State.
As Nedoroscik’s former coach, Jepson said that what people see from him on television and other platforms is genuinely how he has always been.
“Every day that I’ve worked with Stephen, every day that I’ve known him, what the public has now seen, is what I’ve seen. He’s a genuine guy. He’s who he is. He’s not some facade, he’s humble, he’s very successful, but he is one of a kind,” Jepson said.
Looking ahead, Nedoroscik said because he’s achieved a lot, he can go to competitions with a little less stress on his shoulders — but he still has big dreams. He wants to return to the Olympics and get a gold medal. But with his new platform he really wants to help grow the sport of gymnastics.
“For the last couple of decades here, we’ve seen a decline in the sport and that’s really scary for us, especially because we just made history at the Olympic Games. That’s our first bronze medal in 16 years,” he said. “One thing that I’d really love more than anything else to do on my platform is just see the sport grow. And one thing that I really do love about the sport is that when you buy in and you understand what’s going on, it is hard to not love it, especially with how great the community is and how great the guys are.”
He encouraged the crowd to check out some upcoming Penn State gymnastics meets; the men’s team competes against Michigan on Feb. 1, which is who Nedoroscik’s Olympic teammate Paul Juda competes for.
Nedoroscik also took questions from the audience, which included what his favorite State College bar and restaurants are (Doggie’s Pub and Wings Over), his favorite type of cheese (classic aged white cheddar), which dorm he lived in on campus (Hartranft Hall), and his favorite class at Penn State (an engineering class about signals and processing).
One student asked a question about how he calms his nerves before and during a competition. The answer was something the world saw play out during the Olympics and is what lead to his viral moment.
“Ironically, my viral moment is exactly that. I tilt my head back, I close my eyes, and I tell myself positive things. ‘You deserve to be here. You put the work in. You’re going to do a good job.’ And all at the same time, one thing that I always tell people is control the controllable: your heart rate and breathing. I always do five seconds in, five seconds out, and when you breathe like that, you can control your heart rate. You can take it from a panic attack and bring it down to normal levels. And that is so important in those scenarios,” he said.
Before leaving the stage in the HUB’s Heritage Hall, he led a “We Are” chant.
