Meet Stephen Nedoroscik, the Clark Kent of pommel horse

(NEXSTAR) — Social media is in love with Stephen Nedoroscik. With a medal on the line Monday in Paris, the American gymnast removed his glasses, jumped up on the pommel horse, and secured a bronze medal for Team USA. He put his glasses back on before celebrating.

That was his only event in the team competition. Nedoroscik did his job. You can call him the Clark Kent of pommel horse.

The memes started almost instantly with social media users making the super hero comparisons.

“Obsessed with this guy on the US men’s gymnastics team who’s only job is pommel horse, so he just sits there until he’s activated like a sleeper agent, whips off his glasses like Clark Kent and does a pommel horse routine that helps deliver the team its first medal in 16 years,” @MegWritesBooks posted to X.

“While the pressure kept building in the gym, he meditated. A slight smile crept onto his face when he heard the cheers for his teammate’s score,” Whitney Fleming wrote in a viral post on Facebook. “And then, like Clark Kent turning into Superman, he took off his jacket, removed his glasses, and puffed out his chest–and HE KILLED IT!”

Nedoroscik is a 25-year-old pommel horse specialist from Worcester, Massachusetts. It takes a certain type of single-mindedness to make the choices Nedoroscik has made for the last decade, when he essentially decided to dedicate himself to a single pursuit, focusing on an event that has long been a weakness for the U.S. men’s national team program.

The 2012 Olympic team topped qualifying. Then they led off on pommel horse in the finals and saw their medal hopes vanish one mistake at a time.

Nedoroscik understood the history. It’s one of the reasons he gravitated toward pommels. Another is the fact that it requires many things — stamina, strength and creativity chief among them — that he has in spades, particularly that last one.

He describes himself as a “late bloomer” on the event. Those early struggles only helped him press forward.

“Running into trouble on the apparatus early on taught me how to fight, how to stay on, how to really go for that routine,” Nedoroscik said. “And I think that that has stuck with me throughout.”

Unlike other events, which are painstakingly laid out and practiced on end for months if not years, pommel horse allows gymnasts to color outside the lines and make things up as they go on. Miss an element here? Well, maybe you can make it up trying something else later in the routine.

He says the end result is the feeling of “flying through the air,” though it’s more akin to levitation.

Nedoroscik will soar into the event finals Saturday with a chance to put another medal in his carry-on before he heads home. His 15.200 qualifying score tied Ireland’s Rhys McClenaghan for the tops among the eight finalists.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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