OPINION: Boys are flocking to gymnastics classes, thanks to ‘pommel horse guy’

Greg Patterson has been waiting decades for it to happen.

“We usually get a call or two a week for boys,” said Patterson, a former collegiate gymnast who owns a gymnastics facility in suburban Virginia that has always been packed with girls.

“Now we’ve had at least 15 calls. All boys,” Patterson, 49 and a little giddy, said. “They all want to try gymnastics. It’s finally cool, I guess.”

The juggernaut was Stephen Nedoroscik, of course, the bespectacled pommel horse guy who competed on only one apparatus in the Olympics but helped end the U.S. men’s 16-year medal drought in gymnastics. He has been that supernova that Patterson hopes will change the sport.

And this is a hugely important lesson for America right now.

One that goes beyond sports. One that shows us — in a package not usually acknowledged in this discussion — that representation matters.

For Patterson, gymnastics was lonely, with only two other boys around when he was a kid and getting really good at rings.

In college, he found a few other compatriots on a male club team. But for the most part, women dominated the sport. It continues to be true at his gym in Woodbridge, the Youth Sports Training Center.

Patterson loved gymnastics and was a natural. He was inspired by the blond wonder, Bart Conner, an Olympics darling who led the U.S. men’s team to a gold medal and won his own gold on parallel bars in Los Angeles in 1984.

But there have been few golden boys since that team and Conner.

Meanwhile, the world of women’s gymnastics was blossoming with talent and color. The majority-white sport, long inaccessible thanks to expense and culture, was seeing young women of color rise and dominate.

“Betty Okino and Dominique Dawes were the trailblazers in my day,” Onnie Willis Rogers, one of only five Black women to ever win the individual all-around title in NCAA gymnastics, wrote in a recent essay for CNN. “I watched them represent Team USA with their brown bodies and Black girl hair and I knew it was a little more possible for me.”

That podium now looks a lot more like America.

So it may seem odd to include a white man from Massachusetts in this discussion.

Especially because barrier-breaking Frederick Richard, a Black man from Massachusetts, also posted a spectacular score, also won a bronze in the team all-around and also advocates for men in the sport.

“People don’t see gymnastics from the men’s side,” he said in an interview with Andscape. “You see basketball every single day.”

While Simone Biles helped open up the possibility of gymnastics for many more girls, “right now, people never think of men’s gymnastics as a possibility,” he said.

Richard is known as Frederick Flips on social media, and he is charming, sculpted and charismatic. If I wanted to make my kids cringe, I’d say he has “rizz.” He’s the portrait of an athlete.

But here’s where Nedoroscik, who also earned a bronze medal in the apparatus final on pommel horse, represents something different.

“Steve, I think he’s going to be fantastic for us, because, you know, he’s just a normal-looking kid,” said Doug Lubking, who owns Gym Quest in Richmond and is a former collegiate gymnast.

“He’s not like the guys you saw on the rings. ... My God, they were huge,” Lubking said. “And Steve just looks like a normal kid walking down the street.”

Nedoroscik is inspirational because he seems like those gamer kids who are good at the Rubik’s Cube, who aren’t jocks. He revels in his nerdiness, his glasses, explaining that he’s cross-eyed and a little awkward.

He’s got that Superman thing going.

Every two years, we marvel at the Olympians as gods, these unattainable machines of human perfection.

But Nedoroscik is showing us that athletes don’t have to be archetypes. He fights the boxes we want to put people in. And that’s magic to all the parents of the kids who are uninterested in finding themselves on the spittle-flecked battlefield of football, soccer or lacrosse. Ew, sports.

Gymnastics is grueling, the most difficult sport that Lubking, who also was a wrestler and rugby player, has ever done.

“I’ve brought football players to the gym — you know, big guys — and they can’t even lift themselves up on the rings,” he said.

For the world to see that astonishing strength and agility in someone as unassuming as Nedoroscik can make him a generationally transformative athlete. He gives hope to the kids who aren’t the first pick on the baseball team, who get cut from hockey, who don’t live by swagger.

It’s the boost that Lubking is already seeing at his gym in Richmond — the boy moms calling about traditional gymnastics classes. If Nedoroscik can do this, why not their boys?

Similarly, Noah Lyles electrified America with his historic photo-finish win Sunday in the men’s 100-meter final, and he also embodied the message that representation matters perfectly. And not because of how he looks.

A kid who struggled with asthma, Lyles wasn’t a shoo-in to be the next Usain Bolt.

But after his win, Lyles said it: “Why not me?”

And in a social media post after the breathtaking race, he represented for so many others: “I have Asthma, allergies, dyslexia, ADD, anxiety, and Depression. But I will tell you that what you have does not define what you can become. Why Not You!”

This is the Olympic message we all need.

Petula Dvorak is a columnist for The Washington Post’s local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things. Before coming to The Post, she covered social issues, crime and courts.

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