Stanford men’s gymnastics overcomes setbacks to defend national title
Three months ago, it was unclear if the Stanford men’s gymnastics team would have a season at all. Today, it won its second-straight NCAA team title.
The road to this national championship was longer and definitely weirder than the Cardinal’s 2019 title. For one, there was the lost year in between, when the 2020 season was cut short as the COVID pandemic set in. Fast forward to this year, and the team had to traverse some of the strictest restrictions in the country being located in California. After months of training separately, training in Texas, and just trying to train, in general, Stanford started its season a month after the rest of the NCAA, hit its stride in March, and peaked when it counted.
On Saturday night, the Cardinal led the team standings almost the entire meet, except heading into the final rotation when the Sooners took a narrow lead. As they have all season, Oklahoma gave the defending champs a run for their money, but Stanford put up six complete rotations of 5 up, 5 count routines to win the title with a 414.521.
Oklahoma finished in second with a 411.591, followed by Michigan (410.358), Nebraska (406.624), Minnesota (406.291), and Illinois (397.991).
The undisputed star for the Cardinal on Saturday night was junior Brody Malone.
Two years after winning the 2019 individual all-around title as a freshman, Malone did it again, scoring an 85.064 to hold off second-place finisher and fellow Olympic hopeful Shane Wiskus (84.886). He also won the high bar title with a 14.466.
Oklahoma senior Gage Dyer only competed two events – vault and floor – and he’s coming home with the individual titles on both.
The specialist, who had to take approximately six weeks off this season do to a partial muscle tear, opened his night with a world-class floor performance that featured six passes and six sticks to score a 15.266. He followed that performance up on vault, throwing an incredible Kas triple to earn a 15.033.
Wiskus had a chance at gold in the all-around but sat his vault, opening the door for Malone. In addition to his silver in the all-around, the Minnesota senior took the still rings (14.400) and parallel bars (14.433) titles. While his time as a Gopher has come to an end, along with the program as a whole, the 2019 Nissen Emery Award winner will return to the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado this week knowing he helped his team qualify to and place fifth in its program finale.
Malone and Wiskus will now set their sights on U.S. Championships and Olympic Trials in June, where both athletes are serious contenders for the U.S. men’s four-person Olympic team.
Last but not least, Illinois’ Ian Skirkey took the pommel horse title with a 14.166, besting an early 13.800 lead from Michigan’s Paul Juda.
Speaking of Juda and the Wolverines, many fans are probably wondering: what happened?
Despite major errors on pommel horse, vault, parallel bars, and high bar, Michigan still put up an impressive team score, but it wasn’t the team’s best performance by a long shot.
Juda had an error early in his parallel bars routine, scoring a 13.133, before falling on arguably his best event – high bar – and earning just a 12.166.
Juda’s teammate and the 2021 Winter Cup all-around champion Cameron Bock struggled to hit his routines all night, including a major break in his pommel horse set (12.900), a hand down after stumbling on his vault landing (13.100), and a fall on high bar (12.200).
Other standout performances from the meet included Winter Cup all-around silver medalist Riley Loos impressing with his Maltese shapes on both floor (14.866) and rings (14.166); Zach Martin (14.900) and Vitaliy Guimaraes (14.566) on vault; Donte McKinney (13.733) and Giovanni Gambatese (13.433) on high bar; and Iowa’s all-arounders, Evan Davis (81.931) and Bennet Huang (81.465), having the honor of being the final men’s gymnasts to wear the Hawkeyes uniform, as the program joins Minnesota in being cut after today.
Fun fact: Iowa senior Huang, who plays cello, was accepted to Juilliard last week, which is just too big of an accomplishment (and too cool) not to mention. Congrats, Bennet!
Relive today’s meets with our live blog coverage of finals by clicking here.
