Team USA gymnast Frederick Richard roared to a second-place finish in the men's all-around at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships on Saturday. But his quest for a medal at the championships went hand-and-hand with another quest: to make men's gymnastics more cool.
As part of his goal to help grow the sport, Richard swapped out part of his uniform for the competition. Instead of the stirrup pants and socks typically worn during four of the men's events — parallel bars, high bar, pommel horse and rings — Richard instead opted for color-coordinated compression leggings and a pair of shorts with his University of Michigan uniform.
In order to make the swap, Richard had to deliberately take two three-tenths deductions (-0.3) on his score for both days of the competition. The 21-year-old finished the all-around standings with a score of 162.555, just ahead of bronze medalist Fuzzy Benas, who finished just over two-tenths behind Richard. (If Richard had worn pants within regulation, he would have beaten Benas by eight-tenth — nearly a full point.)
"It's 1,000% worth it," Richard said, via the Associated Press. "If you look at these kids in the crowd, I'm thinking about them and I'm thinking about when I was younger."
Asher Hong, Richard's Team USA teammate at the 2024 Paris Olympics, took first place in the all-around by a massive margin, nearly 7.5 points.
For Richard, the -0.6 in added deductions was worth is as part of a larger goal to raise the profile of men's gymnastics in the United States. Richard, who grew up in Boston, started doing gymnastics at a young age, but ran into early obstacles in terms of his confidence in the sport. He says that the uniform was part of why.
"If I left the gym to go to the gas station, I didn't want anybody to see me in my pommel horse pants," Richard said, via the AP. "Kids would say, 'Do you do gymnastics?' I'd say 'Yeah.' But I didn’t want them to search 'gymnast' and see the uniform. I didn't feel like it was cool."
The stirrup pants — which viewers sometimes compare to "footie pajamas" — are designed to hold close to the leg on certain apparatuses, without excess loose fabric that can serve as a safety hazard.
But Richard's new take on the uniform is one of the ways that he feels that the sport can modernize to bring in more interest.
Much of Richard's decision-making is based around getting younger kids more invested in the sport at an early age, especially when kids start to pick one sport over another.
"It does add to what makes a 12-year-old boy decide, 'Do I want to keep doing this sport? Or should I play football or soccer, because my friends think I’m cool when I play with them?'" Richard said.
On the first day of the competition, Richard wore maize-and-blue zebra strip pants with dark blue shorts; on the second day, he wore striped gray leggings with dark gray shorts.
"(I want them to) see this, and they're like, 'This is cool. I want to wear this. This kid is trying to make the sport cool, he looks cool,'" Richard said. "And that's the stuff that gets kids into the sport, that's stuff that keeps kids in the sport."
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