USA gymnastics men's world championship trials: Who will join Brody Malone and Donnell Whittenburg?

USA Gymnastics will select the remaining three members and one traveling reserve athlete for the 2022 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool, England, this week at the conclusion of its world selection camp in Colorado Springs. The camp includes two days of competition, scheduled for Monday (3 October) and Wednesday (5 October).

U.S. champion Brody Malone and U.S. all-around silver meadllist Donnell Whittenburg locked their spots at August's U.S. Championships in Tampa, based off their performances there. The duo competed at last week's Paris World Challenge Cup, where Whittenburg won still rings and finished third in parallel bars, while Malone was the horizontal bar champion and came in second in parallel bars.

Six athletes are vying for the remaining spots on Team USA: 2021 world pommel horse champion Stephen Nedoroscik, Tokyo 2020 Olympians Shane Wiskus and Yul Moldauer, reigning NCAA all-around champion Paul Juda and newcomers Asher Hong and Colt Walker. Stanford University's Curran Phillips had been named to the camp, but announced last week on Instagram that a lingering back injury had forced him to withdraw.

Team USA, which has finished fifth at the last three Olympic Games, is hoping an increased focus on difficulty will pay dividends in Liverpool, where the three medal-winning teams will directly book their ticket for Paris 2024.

"We all know what we need to do. I mean, we went into the [Tokyo] Games with eight points lower difficulty than the top three teams," said Wiskus in August. "So simplest answer you can get: do harder gymnastics and do it well."

To get there, the U.S. men’s program has implemented a massive domestic bonus scoring system, which provides huge incentives for increased difficulty. The hope, says U.S. high performance director Brett McClure, is that athletes can show their difficult elements without fear of a mistake costing them the funding that comes along with spots on the U.S. national team.

He was pleased with how the system worked at the U.S. nationals.

“Guys are going for much bigger difficulty. We're not executing at the level we want right now, but that's expected and that's why the bonus is there,” said McClure, a 2004 Olympic team silver medallist. “It's basically to give them a cushion to make mistakes and to feel comfortable enough to do the difficulty and still make the national team so they don't have to worry about that.”

With the worlds team final format set at five athletes on the team and three to perform on each event with all three scores counting, the U.S. will look to build its team around Malone, an all-arounder who could potentially compete on all six events in the team event, and Whittenburg, who excels on the still rings, vault and parallel bars.

This line-up puzzle could make team selection complicated for a one-event specialist like Nedoroscik, whose pommel horse gold medal at last year’s world championships was a first for Team USA, unless he can show the potential to offer the U.S. a tremendous boost.

Instead, the format will most likely favour the likes of Walker and Moldauer, who would have finished second and third, respectively, at the U.S. championships without the bonus rules in place.

The final decision will be made by a selection committee that consists of McClure, athlete representatives Akash Modi and Alex Buscaglia and others. Their decision will be based off scores with no bonus rules with the two days of the U.S. champions and two days of camp competition holding equal weight.

The U.S. women will select their team at a selection camp in Houston, 21-22 October.

How to watch USA gymnastics men's world championship trials: 

USA Gymnastics is streaming the competition on its FlipNow platform.