Red-Hot Moldauer Regaining His Olympic Gymnastics Form

Yul Moldauer reacts after competing in the pommel horse during the 2022 U.S. Gymnastics Championships on Aug. 18, 2022 in Tampa, Florida.

Yul Moldauer was always precocious. Even when he was an adolescent, the Colorado native’s high-energy routines and X Games-worthy skills endeared him to those who follow men’s gymnastics, who saw a serious prospect coming several years away.

To his surprise, Moldauer nearly made the Olympic team in 2016 at age 19, skipping several of the rungs U.S. gymnasts normally alight on their way up the Olympic ladder. The next year, his feather-light landings on floor exercise helped him earn a bronze medal at the world championships, the surest sign that his future at the center of the U.S. men’s team was secure.

And so it was – until suddenly it wasn’t.

After his Olympic turn in Tokyo, Moldauer gradually faded out of the top four. In 2022, following an up-and-down season, he finished fifth at the U.S. Championships and was named traveling alternate to the world championships team. The move marked the first time that he had not been one of the competing team members since 2017.

It was a comedown for a man who had fought an uphill battle a year earlier to finish fourth all-around at the post-Games world championships, notching the highest finish by a U.S. man since 2010.

“That really hurt,” Moldauer, now 26, said candidly on a recent conference call with reporters. “And instead of getting mad and frustrated because of who they picked or who was out there – at the end of the day (the world championships team) was picked fair and square – I realized that mentally I was just kind of going through the motions. I wasn’t all there.”

If 2022 was the regression, 2023 has been a return to form so far. Moldauer won Winter Cup in February and followed up with the all-around title at last month’s Pan American Championships in Medellin, Colombia, becoming the first American man ever to be crowned continental champion.

Conditions weren’t ideal – Moldauer competed with a fractured toe and the heat in the arena “felt like you were competing in a sauna,” he reported – but he was psyched all the same.

“This year I’ve been taking a different approach mentally, of like, ‘No, this is what I get to do. This is what I want to do,’” he explained. “So now every time I go and compete, I just remind myself that this is an opportunity, that it doesn’t happen a lot, and I can’t just take advantage or get used to it, and I think that’s what I was doing last year.

“I’ve kind of had the fire in my belly of making sure that I’m keeping my name in the picture, that I’m still relevant to the sport, and that going into the Olympic year, I’m making statements about why I should be on the team.”

Yul Moldauer competes in the rings during the 2022 USA Gymnastics Championships on Aug. 20, 2022 in Tampa, Florida.

Moldauer’s resurgence comes at an opportune time; the team needs him.

Two-time U.S. champion Brody Malone broke his leg at a meet in Germany in March, and while a return for Paris is feasible, Malone may not be ready on all six apparatus by the Games. That’s bad news for a U.S. men’s team desperate to break out of the fifth-place holding pattern it has been in at the last three Olympics.

Rather than the we’ll-show-‘em talk that has characterized some past teams, Moldauer has taken a more philosophical approach. He’s studied the 2004 and 2008 U.S. Olympic teams, the last to medal at the Olympics, and asked himself what was different about them and how the current crop can get what they had.

“Our start scores are there,” Moldauer concluded, “but I think what we’re lacking now is our identity — what we represent and who we are as a team when we go out on the floor.”

The team has been working on building chemistry and camaraderie, he said, trying to capture something of the NCAA atmosphere that Moldauer found so inspiring during his decorated college career at Oklahoma from 2016 to 2019.

He himself has been working to up his difficulty scores, the main reason for his fifth-place finish at nationals in 2022 and plans to unveil double-twisting double layouts on both his floor exercise and as his dismount on still rings.

Woven into Moldauer’s gymnastics today is a sense of responsibility and leadership that wasn’t there in his teen years.

“We’re the older guys now,” he said of he and Malone and their Tokyo Olympics teammate Shane Wiskus, “and our focus is: what kind of team do we want to have? And what kind of team do we want to leave when we’re done with the sport?”

Even after so many years at or near the top, he knows now that nothing is a given, and he’s at peace with it.

“I feel like I’ve matured quite a lot,” he said. “I can strongly say these last few national team camps, competitions, it’s really starting to show.”

Because Yul Moldauer doesn’t get mad. He figures out how to get better.