Frederick Richard leads after opening night of U.S. Olympic Team Trials for gymnastics
2023 World all-around bronze medallist Frederick Richard has been building to this moment.
Following April's NCAA Championships, where the 20-year-old helped lead his University of Michigan Wolverines to a second-place finish behind Stanford University, Richard has been hard at work, focused on peaking as the Olympic Games Paris 2024 near.
On Thursday night (27 June), that plan took shape as he soared to the top of the leaderboard after night one of competition at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials for gymnastics inside Minneapolis' Target Center.
Richard posted an 85.600 total, holding off Tokyo 2020 Olympian Brody Malone, who tallied 85.100. Shane Wiskus is third (84.300).
"I feel definitely a lot more... I would say stronger, I can handle way more skills, way more routines in one day and not gas out as much," Richard said at last month's U.S. Championships. "Definitely at [NCAAs], I was gassing out towards the end of the competition, but now I'm able to push. I have a good training plan of how to handle the load that I'm going through right now, I feel really confident."
That confidence paid off as Richard tallied three top three individual event finishes, including the top marks on floor exercise (14.600) and horizontal bar (14.400). He was third on the parallel bars with a 15.050. Richard's other scores were 13.450, pommel horse; 13.800, still rings; and 14.200, vault.
For Malone, the first seven seconds of his competition Thursday wouldn’t have seemed possible a year ago.
Last June, Malone was still months removed from being able to resume much of anything resembling gymnastics training after a catastrophic injury that came after he slipped on a horizontal bar dismount at a competition in Germany.
In the opening moments of the trials, that seemed a distant memory as Malone earned a 14.600 on the vault, sticking a Kasamatsu one-and-a-half, sans the knee brace that had aided his efforts on floor and vault at May’s U.S. Championships.
The 24-year-old went on to add solid efforts on the parallel bars, 14.750; horizontal bar, 14.300; floor exercise, 13.750; pommel horse, 13.450; and still rings, 14.200.
In the three years since Malone made the U.S. squad for Tokyo 2020, the Stanford graduate has transformed from new kid on the block to team leader, an integral part of what the Americans hope will be a first Olympic team medal since Beijing 2008.
That hasn’t changed how he’s thinking about competition in Minneapolis.
“It definitely feels a little bit different, but I try to approach it the same,” he told Olympics.com prior to competition. “My approach going into the Tokyo trials was just go and do my gymnastics and make sure I take care of myself. That’s going to put me in the best spot to make the team, and that's my same approach for this.”