Yul Moldauer offers no excuses for the 16-month whereabouts suspension he received from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for missing three drug tests in 2024.
That didn't make looking at his mentions on social media any easier for a gymnast who has a national title, two world championship medals and an Olympic appearance on his resume.
“I've read everything online, ‘Maybe Yul was doing drugs,’” Moldauer said. “I have more than 10 years of being clean. It sucks. But at the end of the day, it's my responsibility.”
While Moldauer points out all three of the tests he missed came during the competition season — when schedules can get hectic — and that he successfully passed spot tests in between the misses, he also knows that it doesn't matter. He knew the rules and he got sloppy.
“It's just embarrassing,” he said.
And now, it's over. Moldauer will return to international competition for the first time in two years on Saturday when he competes as part of Team USA at the reimagined American Cup in Henderson, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas.
The event — which will use the mixed team format that will likely make its Olympic debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Games — includes 43 gymnasts from a dozen countries, led by Olympic and world champion Daiki Hashimoto of Japan and Hezly Rivera, the reigning U.S. champion and a member of the star-laden American team that won gold at the 2024 Paris Games.
It's a particularly stacked field, one that Moldauer is grateful to be a part of after the 29-year-old's long, winding path back from the brink.
The suspension banned Moldauer from working out at USA Gymnastics-affiliated gyms. It also cast him adrift.
“I was a little lost, I was not myself,” he said. “I was depressed. I was sad. I was torn.”
Relentlessly upbeat when he's on the competition floor — Moldauer is a livewire when he salutes the judges, punctuating every dismount with a fist pump and a “Let's go!” — finding that spark while eyeing a year-plus away from the sport that has long defined him has forced him to make some difficult choices.
He got a job at a factory not far from his home in the Denver suburbs, requesting a schedule that would let him work a full day by 2 p.m., which freed up his evenings to train at a local fitness gym alongside weekend warriors, dadbods and seniors trying to stay in shape.
Moldauer knows he must have “looked like a monkey” while he made his way from station to station trying to keep his body strong and flexible enough to do gymnastics without actually doing gymnastics. Leaning into his experience during the COVID-19 pandemic — when gyms were shut down for months — helped.
That doesn't mean it was easy.
“I was walking through hell, being completely torn out of something I've done for 20-plus years,” he said.
Did he think about quitting? Just about every day, particularly when he was about halfway through the suspension. He watched the vast majority of guys he grew up competing against move on to the next chapter of their lives and wonder if maybe it was time for him to do the same. The fear that he couldn't keep pace with a talented new wave ate at him.
One nagging thought kept him going: a promise he made to himself long ago.
“I’ve always had one goal in my entire life and that is to get an Olympic medal,” said Moldauer, who was a non-traveling alternate on the 2024 U.S. men's team that earned a bronze in Paris. “I told myself ‘Ten years from now, if I look back and think about how healthy I felt, do I think I could have pushed another 2 1/2 years (toward the 2028 Games)?’ And I would have said ‘Yes, I should have done that.’”
That was a part of it, to be sure. Yet it wasn't the only factor. Moldauer has long leaned into being a role model to younger athletes in a division of the sport that is seemingly constantly under threat of being rendered irrelevant. If he bailed during his forced sabbatical, he wondered what message that might send.
“I wanted to go out my way,” he said. “I didn’t want the suspension to pull me out. I didn’t want that to be the last thing people remembered about me.”
So he kept going, returning to competition at an event in Colorado in January, then finishing second to Frederick Richard at the Winter Cup last month, a performance that landed him back on the national team. He'll do a couple of events at the American Cup this weekend, then head to Europe for a World Cup event where he might do “a little more.”
Moldauer views them all as stepping stones. His skills are not where they will need to be if he wants to make it to Los Angeles. Upgrades are coming this summer in hopes of making the world championship team.
If there is a silver lining in all this, it's that he's as healthy as he's been in a long, long time. The back and shoulder problems that dogged him earlier in his career are gone, replaced by optimism that maybe his best gymnastics are still ahead of him.
“I feel like my body got a reset, my mind got a reset,” Moldauer said. “And I've got nothing to hide.”
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FILE -Yul Moldauer celebrates after competing on the pommel horse during the U.S. gymnastics championships June 1, 2024, in Fort Worth, Texas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez, File)
