Video: Frederick Richard narrowly achieves all-around victory at men’s gymnastics trials

Frederick Richard will lead the United States’ men’s gymnastics team to the Paris Olympics after winning the all-around competition at the Olympic trials.

Team USA has not won a team medal in men’s gymnastics since 2008, according to NBC Olympics .

After making the Olympic team for the first time last month, Richard expressed confidence in the team’s prospects of coming home with a medal.

“You can expect from me and the team some medals at Paris,” Richard said in a postcompetition interview. “Our team is coming home with medals.”

Training was the most challenging part for Richard, he said. By the time he was ready to compete, he already had victory on the mind.

“I honestly felt like surviving the practice and training up to this was the win, and when I came here I already knew I was going to win because I just trained super hard for it,” he said.

During the first day of the Olympic trials, Richard started slowly but eventually climbed to the top of the leaderboard. He maintained his lead throughout the second day of competition, finishing with a total score of 170.500.

He narrowly defeated three-time national champion Brody Malone, who scored 170.300.

Malone’s participation in the Paris Olympics was uncertain due to a knee injury sustained over a year ago, per NBC Olympics .

Asher Hong, Paul Juda and Stephen Nedoroscik will join Richard and Malone on the men’s gymnastics team.

Despite finishing third in the all-around rankings, Shane Wiskus is only an alternate for the U.S. Olympic team, according to USA Today .

Competitors for the men’s gymnastics team are chosen using a complex mathematical formula, and Wiskus did not make the cut, the article said.

“I had the best two days of competition of my life,” Wiskus said, per USA Today. “So it’s all I can do.”

“Every athlete out there just laid it all on the line, has been training their entire lives for this,” Brett McClure, the high performance director for the U.S. men’s gymnastics program, said about the decision, according to USA Today. “And it is absolutely gut-wrenching. It’s horrible for the ones who don’t quite make it.”

“It’s great for the ones that do,” he continued. “It’s life-changing for them. So the roller-coaster of emotions is absolutely real, and it never gets easier to manage, in my position.”