MINNEAPOLIS — Brody Malone’s journey back to the Olympics nearly ended 16 months before the Paris Games kick off July 26.
The world champion gymnast from northwest Georgia let go of the high bar at a March 2023 competition in Germany and landed awkwardly. In that moment, the United States’ most accomplished male gymnast was sidelined indefinitely with a dislocated knee, fractured tibia and torn ligaments.
That helps explain why the typically cool-headed 24-year-old let loose with a loud celebration upon sticking his high-bar dismount at the national championships earlier this month in Fort Worth, Texas. Competing in his first all-around since the injury, Malone went on to post the highest score that night and then again two days later to claim his third U.S. title.
That result makes Malone, who is from Rockmart, again the favorite coming into this week’s U.S. Olympic Team Trials in Minneapolis, where five men and five women will be named to the teams that will compete next month in Paris.
“It gave me a lot of confidence to kind of prove to myself that I could still do it,” Malone said of the national championships, where he also claimed the high-bar title. “I could come back and still do all-around and still be competitive and put up good scores.”
The trials combine two days of gymnastics, with the men Thursday and Saturday, and the women Friday and Sunday. Malone could clinch the Paris spot automatically with another all-around win if he’s also among the top three on three individual apparatuses. If not, anything close to what he did in Fort Worth should still have him on the squad once the selection committee runs the numbers to determine the highest-scoring team combinations, which account for much of the criteria.
Malone returns to a young team with big ambitions.
Last year, with Malone sidelined, the trio of Asher Hong, Fred Richard and Khoi Young — all 20 or younger — led the U.S. to four medals at the world championships, including team bronze. That snapped a nine-year streak of Team USA missing the podium at a global championship.
Richard, the social-media savvy 2023 NCAA champ from the University of Michigan, came home from worlds in Antwerp, Belgium, with an all-around bronze medal.
In his nationals return, Malone beat Richard by more than two points over the two days.
“To see his success at U.S. championships was inspiring, in all levels,” said Brett McClure, the U.S. men’s high-performance director.
A little more than a year earlier, McClure was next to the high bar in Germany when Malone was injured.
“Honestly, at that point in time, I really didn’t think he was going to be doing gymnastics again,” McClure said. “I thought he was set and ready to go fishing and move on with his life.”
The former 10-time NCAA champion at Stanford underwent the first of three surgeries while still in Germany. Instead of prepping for a big pre-Olympic summer of competition, he was stuck in bed. Not an ideal setting for a guy who hates sitting around — and crutches.
“I hate crutches,” Malone said. “They’re the worst.”
He also left his Stanford training base to join other top post-collegiate gymnasts at EVO Gymnastics, an ambitious club based in Sarasota, Florida.
Even in January, when he returned to a small meet in Houston, Malone’s Olympic outlook appeared more likely as a specialist than an all-arounder, with the leg-intensive floor exercise and vault not yet in the cards.
Just being back out on the competition floor gave him confidence he could come back, though, he said. And as the weeks went on, vault and then floor exercise started coming back to him. Heading into nationals, he had still only practiced a full floor routine a couple of times — “which normally I would have done way more than that,” he said. But it was during that time when he started to feel like he could really be an all-arounder again.
“I was like, ‘OK, this is this is going to be possible,’” he said.
While Malone’s return headlines the men’s competition in Minneapolis, Simone Biles and Suni Lee lead a loaded women’s field into their trials Friday and Sunday at the Target Center.
Among the field of 16 women are four returning Olympic medalists — including Biles and Lee — plus five other gymnasts who have won medals at the world championships, making for what might be the deepest Olympic trials field ever.
Yet the clear leader of the pack is the same person it’s been for most of the past 11 years.
Biles, who at 27 already is the most decorated gymnast of all time, made more history at nationals when she swept the all-around and all four event titles. It’s a feat that Biles also accomplished in 2018, and before that hadn’t been done since Dominique Dawes did it in 1994.
Three years after pulling out of the Tokyo team final while suffering from “the twisties,” the seven-time Olympic medalist might be at her highest level ever this summer.
Competition for the other four spots on the U.S. team is expected to be fierce, with two-time world all-around medalist Shilese Jones and Lee, the 2021 Olympic all-around champion, among the top contenders.
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