This is Legit

IT ALL BEGAN with Steve Hug.

Growing up in Southern California, Hug learned gymnastics as a lifestyle rather than a sport – in his yard, at local parks and at Muscle Beach in Venice. He didn’t care about competition as much as having a good time and sharing his experience with others. 

In the 1960s, freedom of expression was at its peak and the spirit of gymnastics seemed to carry the sport more than regimented training did, which was just fine with Hug. He was a prodigy and gyms filled for his high school meets, and at age 16 at the 1968 Mexico City Games he became the youngest male Olympian in American history.

Hug came to Stanford in 1970, but didn’t make his much-anticipated gymnastics debut until January 14, 1972. The Old Pavilion was rocking. Fans had to be turned away from the packed gym.

Hug received the biggest ovation, scored the most points, and led Stanford to a dual-meet victory over USC that Friday night.

On his second Olympic team later that year, Hug reached the individual all-around finals in Munich. He was the first national team gymnast in Stanford history, the first Olympian, first Nissen-Emery winner as college gymnastics’ top senior – and the first to provide the notion that Stanford men’s gymnastics could be a landing spot for those who wanted the best competitive opportunity this country could offer. 

Other gymnasts made this assertion by coming to Stanford – Jair Lynch, Josh Stein, David Durante, Akash Modi – but never has Stanford, or perhaps any collegiate setting, become such a destination for aspiring Olympians in this sport as it is now. Stanford is the heart of the U.S. national team. 

Stanford has six current gymnasts in the national team system. Asher Hong, Ian Lasic-Ellis, Riley Loos, Brody Malone, and Khoi Young are on the senior national team and Jeremy Bischoff is on the senior development team. Four others – Brandon Briones, Taylor Burkhart, Ian Gunther, and Colt Walker – have been and hope to be on the national team again. And two graduates are on the national team and continue to train at Stanford. Those are Curran Phillips and Blake Sun.

On March 9-12, Loos, Phillips, and Sun represented the U.S. at the Baku World Cup in Azerbaijan, where Loos won bronze on floor exercise. Malone and Hong made up two of the five U.S. gymnasts competing at the DTB Pokal Team Challenge in Stuttgart, Germany from March 17-19. The duo helped the U.S. earn gold in the biggest team competition outside the World Championships and Olympics, while Hong earned individual bronze on pommel horse.

The numbers add up to 12 with national team ties training at Stanford, with 10 on Stanford’s team right now. Ford Center isn’t just Stanford’s training home. It’s a self-sustaining national team camp. And the program’s reputation created by 21-year head coach Thom Glielmi grows exponentially each year.

As March advances, and Stanford draws closer to defending its NCAA championship for the fourth consecutive season, Cardinal gymnasts describe why this training environment works so well for them.

Khoi Young, a sophomore and national team gymnast, isn’t using the term ‘enemies’ literally when referring to his teammates, but the concept is the same. If you want to be the best, pay close attention to your strongest competitors and use that knowledge to become better. It just happens that Young’s main competition is in the same room.

“A lot of the guys on the team, we competed together a lot before coming here,” Young said. “I knew if I wanted to get to the next level, I needed to train with those guys that were doing the things I wanted to do.”

As more of the other top recruits committed to Stanford, Young didn’t want to be left behind.

“I want to be near them,” Young said. “Keep your enemies close type-of-thing.”

Fifth-year senior Brody Malone, a 2020 Olympian and seven-time NCAA individual champion now out with an injury, felt the same way.

“In order for me to be the best, I want to try to be the best on every single event,” Malone said. “Right now, Khoi is the best on pommel horse, so I’m looking at him. OK, this is the standard I need to set. I need to figure out what I need to do to beat him, or at least get close. And that’s going to make me a better all-around gymnast.”

There are national-caliber gymnasts at every apparatus. It’s not just Young, it’s alum Curran Phillips on parallel bars or freshman Asher Hong, sixth all-around at the 2022 World Championships, on vault, where he is the reigning U.S. champ.

“When you’re in the gym with that kind of stuff and there’s that high of a standard, it really pushes you as high as you can to get to that standard,” Malone said.

Everyone has their own specialties and strengths, and “I’m constantly trying to match up my strengths against theirs,” Young said. “Some guys are really good at rings. I’m not, so I have to make sure I do better at horse than this guy does at rings.”

Malone won gold in the horizontal bar and was fourth in the all-around final at the 2022 World Championships, using Stanford as his platform to that success. He is Stanford's first world champion and the only Cardinal to medal at Worlds in program history, with a horizontal bar bronze in 2021 in addition to his 2022 gold.

Hong and Walker were on that 2022 U.S. team at Worlds too. Among the five-member team that placed fifth in the world in 2022, three were active Cardinal gymnasts.

In this environment, Walker can observe and study and examine what can make himself better, especially in how he related to Malone. 

“In my head, I’m thinking, if I can beat him in practice, technically I’m better than the fourth guy in the world,” Young said. “So, that’s all I’ve got to do, beat the fourth guy in the world. Then I can start looking at who’s No. 3, and No. 2 …

“Same with Asher. He does one of the hardest vaults in the world. If I can beat him, where does that put me against the best in the world? It’s fun to match yourself up against what’s in the gym, because that represents the best in the country.”

Stanford won five national titles before Malone arrived in 2019, but the Cardinal was experiencing an eight-year drought until then.

“When I was being recruited here, I could see Stanford had the potential to be what it is today,” said Walker, a junior, and 2022 U.S. parallel bars silver medalist.

As Malone was beginning to establish himself as a freshman on a team that would win the NCAA title in dramatic fashion, a recruiting class – perhaps the best in school history to that point -- put ink to paper to alter the balance of power.

Stanford's class included four national champions -- Brandon Briones, J.R. Chou, Riley Loos, and Zachary Martin. A year later came another stellar class -- Jeremy Bischoff, Brandon Nguyen, and Walker. Stanford signed Hong, the nation’s No. 1 recruit, a year later.

“I remember coming here as a freshman and thinking, OK, this is legit,” Walker said. “Everyone here is a fantastic gymnast. There are no outliers. This was the environment I could see myself thriving in. It’s an environment you have to be in and witness every single day to fully understand the scope of how fantastic these guys are.”

If Stanford has a trademark, it’s the difficulty of its routines. Glielmi, the U.S. national team coach at the Tokyo Olympics, understands that the United States is in a hole before any global championship meet even starts, because China, Japan, and Russia, simply perform harder routines. 

Their start values are so high, the U.S. has to play from a deficit. The U.S. could be perfect and still finish far behind a China team that could be far from perfect.  

For the Stanford gymnasts with international aspirations – which is just about everybody – attempting more difficult routines is vital to America’s hopes of cutting into that massive deficit. And if that gives Stanford the advantage against other college programs … even better.

“We’re pushing up our difficulty to match these other countries,” Walker said. “We’re not there yet by any means, but we’re on a good trajectory. If we do that and bring the attitude and grit we’re known for, to fight to the end, and they mess up … we could swoop right in.”

Unlike women’s gymnastics, which has differences in rules and scoring between collegiate and international competitions, the men are aligned between both worlds. That enables collegians to perform the same routines in both forums. Therefore, colleges serve as logical training grounds for the men’s national team.

“The NCAA goal goes hand in hand with the national team goal,” Walker said. “One hundred percent.”

“That mindset generally helps you become a better gymnast, whether it’s NCAA or not,” said national-teamer Ian Lasic-Ellis. “That international view is really important. It doesn’t matter if you’re on the national team, the standard is an international-level routine that could make event finals at a big championship.”

The drawback is … it takes time. Stanford may score low early in the season as the gymnasts assimilate to higher degrees of difficulty. But by NCAA’s, advantages should take hold. If Stanford has a trademark, that is it. The Cardinal pushes the envelope.

Every Wednesday during meet week, the Stanford gymnasts step out of the locker room and onto the Ford Center training gym floor in uniform. They salute the coaches and warm up for the opening event. The Wednesday intrasquad is a meet of its own, behind closed doors. 

Ask the gymnasts which is more nerve-racking, most will say “intrasquad.” 

“I would say the intrasquads are definitely more stressful than the meet,” Bischoff said.

“Every single turn you take in practice, the coaches are watching, your teammates are watching,” Bischoff said. “Every turn matters, you can’t take any throwaway turns. There’s a certain amount of intensity. No joking around.”

Every move in every practice is recorded by the coaches and evaluated like a real meet. To even get to the intrasquads, a gymnast must be among the top eight or so at each apparatus, an achievement in itself for a squad so talented and deep. Only five make the lineup in each event and get to compete on Saturday.

“It’s kind of crazy,” Malone said.

“Grind time,” is how Walker describes it. 

The cutthroat nature of the intrasquad serves several purposes. In addition to determining the lineups, it strengthens focus and concentration. It provides more opportunities to compete under pressure – better preparation for a postseason fraught with it.

“Even in the gym, the pressure to perform is just as much, if not more as it is in a competition,” said 10-time All-American Ian Gunther. “I know I’ve earned that spot. I know that I deserve this.”

Talented gymnasts always are left out. There only are so many spots. Nobody takes a lineup for granted.

“We want to send our best possible team to the NCAA Championships,” sophomore Nicolas Kuebler said. “We have our five guys who are earning those spots. But you also have those sixth, seventh, and eighth guys who are right on the cusp and it’s actually those guys who are pushing those top five guys. That dynamic pushes the top guys to be even better.”

How has Glielmi created this culture? By looking at the big picture, seeing the international potential as much as each gymnast’s potential collegiate impact.

“He does a really good job of setting a standard of what he wants to see in the gym,” Malone said. “That standard aligns with your goals as a gymnast. I came in as a freshman wanting to make the national team. He automatically set his standard there for my gymnastics and made sure we held that standard.

“He’s all about accountability.”

Said Young, “He emphasizes that focus in training is No. 1. Train as if you’re competing and when you go out and compete, that’s when you’re supposed to have fun.”

Said Kuebler, “The thing that really drew me to Stanford besides all the athletes and the great university itself, was this training plan, which was created by Thom. Being able to see what you’re doing throughout the entire year and already knowing what you’re going to do when you get into the gym has really improved my performance. That training plan is golden.”

Glielmi has a sense of humor, but in the gym, “he’s all business,” Bischoff said. “Whenever we go to a competition, he knows how to put us in the right mindset and tells us what we need to focus on. He’s very good at knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each individual athlete.”

Team culture is another prized byproduct. The gymnasts are competitors to some degree, but it never spills into the negativity. The team knows it is there to win the NCAA title.

Every athlete strives to find a training environment where they will be surrounded by great teammates, challenged daily, and given the tools to be even better. That formula is applied at Stanford.

“We’ve created and formed this group of guys who all have similar goals – not just in NCAA gymnastics, but for Team USA,” Malone said. “Because of that, we’ve been pretty successful developing guys to get to the elite level.”

Walker was drawn to Stanford’s program by a “culture of excellence” and that has held true.  

“Especially over the last two years, if you want to be an elite gymnast, the best option for you is Stanford,” Walker said. “If you want to be top tier, Stanford can help you do that.” 

It started with one – Steve Hug. His gymnastics survive through film and the memories of those influenced and inspired by him.

Hug didn’t know it, but he started something at Stanford. And his momentum is gaining speed.