Stephen Nedoroscik: USA’s bespectacled, Rubik’s Cube-solving gymnastics hero

Nearly 167 million American adults wear prescription glassesOnly one of them is a hero on the pommel horse.

Stephen Nedoroscik, a 25-year-old from Worcester, Massachusetts, has strabismusbetter known as strabismus, which can cause double vision. He won gold on the pommel horse at the 2021 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships but wasn’t wearing glasses as he scored 14.866 on the pommel horse in Paris on Monday, a performance that earned him bronze, the first medal for a U.S. men’s gymnastics team since 2008.

Yet Nedoroscik put on his glasses to celebrate on stage, resting his eyes in anticipation, an embodiment of the ordinary and the extraordinary who captured an avalanche of memes and Clark Kent/Superman comparisons that even the most myopic social media users would have a hard time missing, and which he explained “awesome”.

He told the Today programme that he “represents people who are perfectly capable of wearing glasses” – a blow to a section of society often derided as being more likely to be found in the library than the gym – and underlined that a physical imperfection should not prevent an athlete from performing superiorly.

His vision, he added, is “not necessarily clear, but the thing about the pommel horse is that if I keep doing it, [my glasses] up, they’re going to fly somewhere. When I’m on the pommel horse, it’s all about feeling the equipment. I don’t even really see it when I’m doing gymnastics. It’s all in the hands – I can feel everything.”

Nedoroscik was a star player at Penn State, where he won two NCAA pommel horse titles and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

As a pommel horse specialist selected over all-arounders in the six-apparatus, five-team event, Nedoroscik had the onus to excel in his single discipline, with expectations similar to those of an NFL kicker with the Super Bowl on the line. He also had the added pressure of going last, having to wait nearly three hours, and “probably had the most pressure of any athlete on the competition floor tonight,” U.S. director of high performance Brett McClure told the Washington Post.

“I really wanted to make the Olympic team, and I knew there was going to be a backlash. I’m doing one event compared to these guys who are phenomenal all-arounders. And I’m a phenomenal horseman. But it’s hard to fit into a team of five,” he told the Post.

But he performed his 40-second routine with gusto, picking up his glasses and holding them aloft as his teammates surrounded him, becoming the latest visually impaired sports hero.

American world artistic gymnastics champion Morgan Hurd triumphantly fought in spectaclesusing a band to hold them in place after deciding that contact lenses were making her eyes dry. Rebeca Andrade, the Brazilian gymnast at the 2020 Olympics and multiple world champion gymnast, has nearsightedness and astigmatism. She struggles to see the jump as she sprints toward it and can’t read the large screens showing her scores, but chooses to compete without She uses contact lenses because she feels she performs better with blurred vision, believing it sharpens her instincts.

Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, Eric Dickerson, Edgar Davids and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are among the famous athletes who have played at the highest level in eyeglasses or ski goggles, but they are outliers despite the large percentage of people with less than perfect vision. Contact lenses offer clear advantages and many professional teams have turned to vision science in an effort to improve performance, both to correct individual flaws and to change the sporting environment, for example by changing the colors of the equipment. Nike has hired an eye expert, Dr. Alan Reichowwho designed tinted contact lenses that reduce glare, a green golf putter and a ball that would be easier for Premier League players to see in dark winter light.

The focus will be back on Nedoroscik on Saturday, who is aiming for individual gold. But bronze is not his only impressive performance in France. Before the final, the Murderous Sudoku fanwho said he spent 45 hours solving one puzzle posted an image of a Rubik’s Cube on social media which he reportedly completed in 9.3 seconds – about half a second shy of his personal best.