Fun is focus vs. top teams
TOKYO — The USA Gymnastics men’s Olympic team, to put it mildly, is not burdened by the weight of great expectations.
For the Americans to gain a team medal Monday night against the likes of Japan, China and the Russian Olympic Committee, Saturday’s top three qualifiers, veteran Sam Mikulak said he and his teammates would need “a really flawless competition for us and a horrible competition for them.”
Since the chance of horrible times three by some of the world’s best gymnasts is limited, Mikulak said he and his teammates were “going to hope for the best in ourselves and wherever we land, we’re just going to be proud of the performances we put out there.”
At times, that they can do, as they showed in their first night of competition.
They had the best threeathlete score of any team on floor exercise and ranked third on rings. Mikulak (parallel bars), Yul Moldauer (floor) and Brody Malone (high bar) each qualified for an event final; Malone (11th place) and Mikulak (14th) will compete in the allaround final.
But the U.S. lacks the top to bottom consistency of Japan, which led on high bar and was in the top three on every event except vault, or China, best in the field on pommel horse and parallel bars. The Russian Olympic Committee team (Russia is barred from competing as a national entity because of doping violations) was best on rings and vault.
Muldauer, meanwhile, came off the parallel bars in his first event and would have had the lowest team score on high bar but for an error-filled routine by Mikulak, who came close to hitting the bar with his chin on one release move and had form breaks, near stall-outs and dismount errors that dropped his execution score to 6.866.
The four-man group made it reasonably unscathed through pommel horse, the kryptonite of U.S. men’s gymnasts for two decades and counting, and couldn’t regain lost ground on vault.
Muldauer, however, said he and his teammates, including former Minnesota gymnast Shane Wiskus, will enter the team final free of pressure.
It’s an attitude that also was evident Saturday night during qualifying, when the men got a boost from the presence of the U.S women’s team, including fivetime medalist Simone Biles, in the otherwise empty Ariake Gymnastics Centre.
“The target is just have as much fun as possible,” Mikulak said. “We’re going to go do what we do. We’re going to be passionate. We’re going to be energized and have fun. If we can go and do that whole competition with the same atmosphere, smiles on her face, that’s the real big thing.”
Team sizes were shaved to four this year to allow for more individual competitors. The U.S had a fifth entry in pommel horse specialist Alec Yoder, whose 15.2 score was fourth-best among all entries and also landed him in event finals.