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

Nearly 167 million American adults wear prescription glasses. Only one is a pommel horse hero.

Stephen Nedoroscik, a 25-year-old from Worcester, Massachusetts, has strabismus, more commonly known as crossed eyes, which can lead to double vision. He won gold on the pommel horse at the 2021 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships but was not wearing glasses when scoring 14.866 on the pommel horse in Paris on Monday, a performance that secured a bronze, the first gymnastics men’s team medal for the US since 2008.

All the same, Nedoroscik donned his spectacles to celebrate on the podium and while resting his eyes beforehand, an embodiment of the ordinary and the extraordinary that sparked an avalanche of memes and Clark Kent/Superman comparisons that even the most myopic social media users would find hard to miss, and which he declared “awesome”.

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He told the Today programme that he is “representing people that wear glasses well” – striking a blow for a segment of society that is often mocked as being more likely to be found in the library than the gym, and underlining that a physical imperfection need not preclude an athlete from producing a superlative performance.

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

Nedoroscik was a college star at Penn State, winning two NCAA pommel horse titles and graduating with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

As a pommel horse specialist selected ahead of all-arounders in the six-apparatus, five team-member event, the onus was on Nedoroscik to excel in his single area of expertise, the expectations comparable to that faced by an NFL kicker with the Super Bowl on the line. He also had the added strain of going last, having to wait for nearly three hours, and “probably had the most pressure than any other athlete tonight on the competition floor,” Brett McClure, the US high performance director, told the Washington Post.

“I really wanted to make the Olympic team, and I knew that there was going to be backlash to it. I do one event compared to these guys that are phenomenal all-arounders. And I am a phenomenal horse guy. But it’s hard to fit on a five-guy team,” he told the Post.

But he delivered his 40-second routine with aplomb, reclaimed his glasses and held them aloft as his teammates mobbed him, becoming the newest visually impaired sporting hero.

The American world champion artistic gymnast Morgan Hurd competed triumphantly in spectacles, using a strap to keep them in place after she decided that contact lenses made her eyes dry. Rebeca Andrade, the Brazilian 2020 Olympic and multiple world champion gymnast, has myopia and astigmatism. She struggles to see the vault as she sprints towards it and cannot read the big screens that flash up her scores, but chooses to compete without contacts as she feels that she performs better with blurry vision, believing that it sharpens her instincts.

Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, Eric Dickerson, Edgar Davids and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are among the famous athletes who played at the highest level in glasses or goggles, but they are outliers despite the large percentage of people with less-than-perfect sight. Contact lenses offer obvious advantages and many professional teams have turned to vision science in a bid to improve performances, both to correct individual defects and to alter the sporting environment, for example by changing kit colours. Nike hired an eye expert, Dr Alan Reichow, who designed tinted glare-reducing contact lenses, a green golf putter and a ball that would be easier for Premier League players to spot during murky winter light.

The focus will be on Nedoroscik again on Saturday as he targets an individual gold. But the bronze is not his only impressive feat in France. Before the final, the Killer Sudoku fan, who said he spent 45 hours solving one puzzle, posted an image of a Rubik’s cube on social media which he appears to have finished in 9.3 seconds – about half a second below his personal best.