Tokyo 2020 Olympian Brody Malone is back on top.
The 24-year-old leads after the first of two nights of men’s competition Thursday (30 May) at the 2024 U.S. Gymnastics Championships in Ft. Worth, Texas. He earned a total score of 85.950, ahead of Fred Richard (84.350). Colt Walker and Donnell Whittenburg (83.500) tied to round out the top three.
Malone was competing on all six apparatus for the first time the 2022 World Championships after suffering a major injury some 14 months ago.
The Stanford graduate put up solid scores from end-to-end, posting no mark lower than 14.000.
“You got to have confidence in yourself that you can do it. I mean… I came in with the mindset of, ‘I just need to do my gymnastics and let the scores fall where they do,'” Malone said of his impressive return. “I’m not coming in thinking, ‘Oh, gosh, I gotta win this. I gotta win this.’ It’s just do my own thing. Do the gymnastics that I’ve been preparing in the gym and [that] I put so many numbers into.”
Malone’s steady day belies a scary mishap in the pre-competition warmup where he took a hard fall on the floor exercise. After collecting himself, he continued his training but appeared tentative in the final touch of the apparatus.
But when the green light came on, Malone rose to the occassion – as he so often has – executing a front full to double pike, a double-double and a stuck triple full to signal the strength of his return.
“I think that was my third full routine back,” he said of floor. “So, I didn’t have the numbers that I usually would have coming into a competition like this. So to be able to just focus up and make it happen in the moment was really nice.”
The final rotation saw his highest score of day, a 14.900, on the horizontal bar with Malone’s high-flying routine punctuated by a stuck layout double-double.
“It felt amazing. I’m usually the guy who doesn’t show much emotion, but I kind of lost it there at the end,” he said of the routine. “It felt really good, that was awesome to go up and hit a routine like that.”
Malone’s other individual apparatus scores were 14.000, floor exercise; 14.100, pommel horse; 14.400, still rings; 14.000, vault; and 14.550, parallel bars.