30 Dec Why Paul Juda Is Ready for 2025
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Why Paul Juda Is Ready for 2025
Post-Olympic opportunities include influential role with GymnastX
By Christy Sandmaier, with Megan Roth contributing
Paul Juda has plans. And with dream success in 2024, he’s ready to take on 2025 by storm as a student-athlete, entrepreneur, and Olympic medalist.
10 months after his first World Championships where he helped Team USA win bronze, Juda walked into the Target Center in Minneapolis looking to make his childhood dream a reality. After having the meet of his life, Juda sat in a room alongside the other 19 competitors, hoping to hear his name called. “I wish I could say I was calm, cool, and collected,” Juda said. “I might have been that on the outside, but my heart was just pounding.”
At the selection for 2023 Worlds, Juda’s name was called last, but in Minneapolis, he heard the selection committee read his name first, and as soon as he heard the first syllable of his name, the tears started flowing. Those tears kept flowing as Juda was announced as the first member of the 2024 U.S. Men’s Olympic team to over 14,000 people in the Target Center and the millions of people watching the broadcast.
Now, he can also say he’s not only an Olympian, but an Olympic team bronze medalist. Juda, who emerged in Paris as a new leader and hype-man for Team USA, performed the best gymnastics of his life with a heart and soul that resonated across the world, inside Bercy Arena and on screens across the country, ultimately standing alongside his teammates Brody Malone, Asher Hong, Stephen Nedoroscik, and his Michigan teammate Frederick Richard – breaking a 16-year Olympic team medal drought for the men.
It was a moment he cherishes beyond words, and also knows can be fleeting as the Olympic hype shifts to LA 2028. It’s also why he’s proactively taking the next steps to build something incredible beyond the gym.
Bridging the Gap
Like so many athletes, Juda, the 2022 NCAA All-Around Champion, has been pursuing his Olympic dreams for most of his life, and while simultaneously competing in the NCAA balancing life as a student-athlete. With his final season for Michigan ready to launch comes the knowledge that the “real world” off the mats, and the absence of the perceived safety net of school, is about to become a reality.
Bridging the gap between their careers and what’s next once the chalk dust has settled is often a difficult transition for athletes, but Juda’s already one step ahead. He joined up with GymnastX after the Games, and he’s ready to go to work on and off the competition floor.
It’s been a natural transition for him so far. He said that gymnasts, in particular, are sought after in the business world because of their extreme work ethic.
“I’m the first person that will always say that I want to be more than a gymnast and that when I’m done with my career, I hope to pursue excellence outside of gymnastics,” he said. “Because I think as gymnasts, we have all of the skillsets. Trust me when I say that all of the network connections that I’ve made with extremely successful professionals, all of them are salivating to get people that are gymnasts into their company.
“They’re like, ‘you have the determination, you have the grit, you have time management skills, you have interpersonal skills, you have everything.’ What’s really cool, too, about gymnastics is that we are like other sports in the sense that people recognize what we do, we just have to be able to communicate it a little bit better. And, I think if I can identify something that most gymnasts don’t know how to do yet is tell their story.”
Gymnasts, especially on the men’s side of the sport, often face an uphill battle when it comes to telling their story and staying in the spotlight even after Olympic, National or NCAA success. Part of it is the complex nature of gymnastics.
“When you look at a football player, a hockey player, a soccer player, those classic sports, everybody knows what they do. Those athletes already warrant and get a lot of respect. When I think about gymnastics, it’s really difficult for me to explain what a high bar routine is to somebody, but I can very easily communicate what the pressure felt like going up on pommel horse for a team medal. I don’t have to tell them what 10 skills I did. I have to tell them what pressure was on me right before I did my routine, and that I executed. That’s a skill that people want, that’s super desired in the workplace.”
GymnastX felt like the perfect fit from the getgo and aligned with Juda’s next set of goals as he looked ahead. The company approached him about an “NIL-type” endorsement following the Games, but Juda wanted more. He pitched an idea and was off and running. He wanted to do more than endorse, he wanted to work. “When I had the opportunity to join on board, I said, ‘why not help grow a business, but also one that actually serves a purpose?’”
Juda has been using GymnastX’s X Bands for over 10 years, the first pair a Christmas gift from his mom and brother. The X Band is a safety band that prevents gymnastics grips from coming undone while allowing gymnasts everywhere to “Xpress themselves doing the sport they love.”
As the Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Brand Officer, Juda is selling a product he truly believes in, working with the team on new ideas, and building his future. He approaches the position with the same drive and pursuit of excellence that’s led him to incredible success as an athlete, and he already loves the connections he’s making and conversations he’s having across the industry.
“As their Chief Revenue Officer, you might be thinking, ‘Hey, he’s just selling me. He’s hard selling me on it.’ But, I wore them at the Olympics, at the NCAA Championships, at the U.S. Championships, at the World Championships, at Trials. I’ve worn them for my entire career. I believe in them,” he said. “I would say if you want to support a small business owner like us, support your gym, and have your custom logos go ahead and do it. I can’t say enough about them. I’ve got endless ideas. For me, this is the perfect situation to be in.”
Why It Matters
Juda also draws a correlation between gymnastics, his time and team at Michigan, and who seems to thrive best inside gymnastics’ unique environment, including the importance of character. To him, it’s what matters most when it comes to pursuing a career and being successful.
“I totally feel so motivated to uphold the title of student-athlete,” he said. “I know there’s always those jokes where people are like, ‘No, no, it’s athlete-student.’ At Michigan, we value the student in student-athlete very, very much. We’re constantly competing for that first place GPA as a team.
“We’re all motivated to be the best types of people. We do such a unique sport. No one really understands it except for gymnasts. But what they do understand is succeeding in life and in all other avenues. I also was emphasizing to the kids, but mostly the parents, too, during a talk on tour, I said, ‘Listen, I think as gymnasts, we all are super-motivated to be really successful in the classroom because we know there’s not a lot of money in gymnastics. So, we end up pursuing more. I’ve got 23 teammates – and I think 11 or 12 of them are engineers. I’m surrounded by people in med school, law school, engineering, computer science, computer engineering, PhDs, all of that. I’m going, ‘Okay, I’ve got to do something, too.’”
Juda is ready to take in his final season as a Wolverine as he continues to build his career once he hangs up his grips for good, whenever he decides it’s time. What he’s learned as a student-athlete has already carried him to tremendous success and Juda credits the Michigan program’s mentality and the unwavering support, determination, and strength of his teammates inside the classroom, as well as in the gym day in day out, for that.
“I care about the character of people that we are because I know that it’s within all of us. I want us all to be successful. I bring it all back to the fact that all of these guys are killers in the gym, just raw focus. And then they’re going to apply that exactly to their careers afterwards. I want us all to move away safely from gymnastics with nothing left on our plate and with no regrets, and then to be able to give back in massive magnitudes.”
Juda’s passion for the sport leading up to Paris and throughout the Games was evident, and it’s clear he’s as determined as ever when it comes to achieving the highest levels of success in everything he does. And with LA on the horizon, anything is possible as he’s proven already.
At the end of the day, his perspective on the sport and life promises to serve him well and fuel whatever comes next.
“This mantra that I’ve got going into my professional world after I exit gymnastics, is going to be more about the one who can do the most good. That’s what drives my entrepreneurial spirit and also just my thirst for wanting to see it in another avenue. Just to finish that off, one person really said it best once to me. They were like, ‘Well, becoming really successful in life is a lot easier than going to the Olympics and getting a medal. Think about the number of people that have an Olympic medal versus the number of people that are successful in business and do the math.’ I was like, ‘right, right, right.’ That’s what’s driving all of my passion, my fire.”
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Home Game
Notable: Michigan will play host to the Big Ten Championships on April 4-5 and will look for its fifth straight Big Ten title, the longest streak for the program since winning six consecutive titles from 1961-66. U-M last hosted the conference championships in 2018, finishing second to Illinois.
The NCAA Championships will also be held in Ann Arbor, with the qualifying round set for April 18 and the finals set for April 19.
The Maize and Blue has finished in the top five at the last five NCAA Championship meets, earning NCAA runner-up finishes for two straight seasons. Michigan last hosted the NCAA Championships in 2014, claiming the national title with a score of 445.050.
The Wolverines return 14 gymnasts who competed at the 2024 NCAA Championships, including five All-Americans and one national champion (Juda, all-around). 2024 Big Ten individual champions Landen Blixt (floor exercise) and Frederick Richard (all-around) also return to the lineup.
The team ranked 2nd in the preseason coaches poll.
Photos by Ricardo Bufolin and Lloyd Smith for Inside Gymnastics
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