Horse Race – Air Force cadet Patrick Hoopes hopes to ride onto the world stage with world-class pommel horse

Horse Race

Air Force cadet Patrick Hoopes hopes to ride onto the world stage with world-class pommel horse

By the Team at Inside Gymnastics

Patrick Hoopes will be the first to tell you he’s a specialist. “I’m a horse guy,” the Air Force Cadet says without hesitation. “I also do parallel bars, but I’m like the back-up to the back-up on that event. I’ve learned in college to have a very, let’s say realistic, view of my talents, and the more I trained on horse, the better I became.”

Better is a bit of an understatement. Hoopes’ horse set boasts a massive 6.5 D (difficulty) value—one tenth higher than reigning World Champ Rhys McClenaghan’s gold medal set— earning him an invite to Winter Cup and he’s scored as high as 15.2 this NCAA season.

Named after his mom, Patricia, and known as “Patty” to his teammates, Hoopes next goal is to make a name for himself on the world stage. 

“My older brother was named after my dad, and my mom decided to name the second child after herself, because she was hoping I’d be a girl,” he says, adding with a laugh. “I do have a little sister, but my mom let me keep the name. No one ever called me Patty until the team here started it, but it stuck, and it’s what everyone calls me now.”

Inside talked with Hoopes about his Air Force experience, how he got so good on horse, and what he hopes his future holds.

INSIDE GYMNASTICS: You’re getting ready to compete at Winter Cup. What are your goals going in, and where do you hope to go from there?

PATRICK HOOPES: Obviously, the goal is making the National Team. That’s the ultimate goal, but if I don’t make team, at least getting enough points to qualify for U.S. Championships in May.

As a specialist, you know that path is narrow, and it can get pretty stressful at times, because you have one event, one chance. When you’re doing the all-around—and I’m not saying doing the all-around is easy—but if you fall, you can come back with, ‘Well, I’ve got five more events to make it up.’ If I fall, that’s it. That’s my shot.

And the horse competition in the United States right now is insane. We have so many great guys, it’s not even a fall, just one mistake, and you’re out of that race. I think we all know that going in.

INSIDE: How do you deal with that level of pressure?

HOOPES: I do a lot of breathing, trying to calm my nerves before I compete. I clear my mind of all those worries. You can’t be thinking, ‘Oh, if I mess this up, I’m doomed,’ right before you go. That wouldn’t make for a good start.

I don’t pay attention to what other guys are doing, what they’re scoring. I’ve learned that trying to be perfect, trying to be first, leads you down a bad train of thought. It’s very important to be in the moment; Totally focused on what I need to do right now, not what happens next.

INSIDE: How do you reach that zen state?

HOOPES: Well, it doesn’t come naturally for me, I can tell you that. It takes a lot of work, and I’m still not perfect at it.

I think the mental aspect is even more important than the physical, because pommel horse is all about control. I’ve hit every skill perfectly, or almost, countless times in practice, but competition—every single competition—feels different. You can have thousands of reps of these skills and it’s still impossible to recreate the feeling of competing—the adrenaline and the nerves—so if the mental part isn’t there, it feels like doing the set for the first time.

Serge (Air Force coach Sergey Resnick) has me do a lot of pressure horse sets. Like, sometimes I’ll go to salute and, right before I go, he’ll tell me to switch to the other side of the horse. Or, just something goofy, like, ‘Take one sock off.’ We’ve done it where I had to run around the floor a couple times and then just jump into a set with my heart rate elevated. We do a lot of things to practice still being able to do the routine regardless of nerves. 

INSIDE: With multiple World medals won in the last few years, horse has never been as competitive within the U.S. as it is right now, with everyone trying to show the hardest set possible. How do you strike a balance between difficulty and execution?

HOOPES: There’s for sure an art to it. I’ve done skills that are upgrades to my current routine that I haven’t put in because, for the one tenth increase, given how much more tired it makes me, it’s just not worth it. For example, I do the Sohn to double Russian, G-flop and I’ve made that with a triple Russian, in routines, multiple times, but just adding that extra Russian in the beginning makes the entire routine feel a million times harder. It’s not worth jeopardizing my chances of hitting for that one tenth upgrade.

I think you see that with everyone at this level. When we go to upgrade, it tends to be one or two or, at most, three tenths, because our routines are already jam-packed.

I do think having all these guys in the U.S. who are good on horse right now helps push us all to be better. To be cleaner and more consistent and squeeze every last tenth out of our difficulty. 

It’s all friendly, but there is that rivalry between the four or five of us who are all at this level, to see who is going to win this meet, who can beat whom, and I think that pressure makes us all better. I think any one of us could be put on a world stage and expect to medal.

As great as that is, I also know that means only one of us, maybe, is going to get a chance to be on that stage. 

INSIDE: Do you have a dream skill you’d like to compete someday?

HOOPES: Busnari is my favorite skill on pommel horse. It looks super good, and it’s obviously a high difficulty skill. 

I’ve made it in practice, but to be in a position where I felt confident to compete it would be months and months of doing it in a routine. Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of routine reps to have a level of confidence that I have the endurance needed. It’s not something you’ll be seeing anytime soon.

I think the hardest set I’ve ever made all the way through in practice was a 6.8, and that was not that different from my routine now, just upgrading the flop and the dismount. It’s not out of the realm of possibility I could compete it someday, but even though it was only three tenths more, it was a LOT harder, so there’s no plans right now.

INSIDE: Do you have someone in the sport you admire, or try to emulate?

HOOPES: I’m not sure there’s necessarily one, because I’m the guy watching a bunch of videos on Instagram for cool combinations and making a mental note of them. 

Obviously, Rhys, watching him win Worlds two times in a row inspires me. I want to have that experience of doing a super-hard, super-clean routine on the international stage and get some hardware for it. 

INSIDE: How fluid is your routine construction? Is it a constant process of tweaking this and that, moving skills in or out, or rearranging them, or are you locked in at this point?

HOOPES: For me, the skills themselves haven’t changed and probably won’t until the Code changes next year, but when it comes to the organization of the routine, I’ve played with that a little bit more, to see what works. The hardest skill for me, the one I need the most energy for, is the G-flop, so I wanted to start with that, and then you sort of play with the natural flow like, might as well do my handle skills because I’m right here. And we’ve done some other just moving things around to better suit how the routine feels to me, but it’s pretty set now.

A big part is just learning where I can take an extra circle if I need to readjust myself. Putting that in to make sure I’m in a good position to do the next big skill has really been critical to my consistency over the past year.

INSIDE: When did you narrow your focus to horse? Did you come into college knowing you wanted to specialize?

HOOPES: I came in without a clue, still doing all six, and it started happening slowly. I got kicked off rings first, which was probably a smart decision, because I’m not one of those skinny guys who are secretly super strong. I’m one of those guys who is just as strong as I don’t look (laughs).

Floor was the next to go, because I wasn’t good at it, and it was going to leave me injured. Then, right after Rocky Mountain Open of my freshman year, I dislocated my elbow on high bar, and in the hospital was told I was never going to touch the high bar again. And I sat there for a minute then said, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’ 

Vault was just another that went by the wayside in coming back from that injury, and I didn’t really miss it. 

Horse just naturally became my focus, and spending two hours doing just one event was something I found I actually liked.

INSIDE: What made you choose the Air Force Academy?

HOOPES: The two key factors that made me decide I wanted to go to Air Force, were that I had an old teammate, Scott McMurray, who I practically grew up with, and he was a 2021 Air Force grad. He was like an older brother to me, and he was always telling me how great it was, which piqued my interest. The other was that if I went that direction, my school would be completely paid for.

I took a recruiting trip, and I liked the team, I liked the coaches, I liked everything about the place BUT the idea of the military. That wasn’t something I had seen in my future. 

My Grandpa retired as a Colonel in the Army, and I had some long talks with him about if this was what I wanted to do with my life, and he helped me decide that it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

INSIDE: What made the Academy too good to pass up?

HOOPES: I mean, if I’m being honest, the best part is that we get paid. Our school is paid for with our service, and we get a stipend on top of that, so that’s something I don’t have to worry about. And it’s a big something. 

The worst part for me, at least in the beginning, were the trainings and other things we are obligated to do outside of school and sports. Spending a Saturday cleaning my room in preparation for inspection, for instance, isn’t something I ever saw myself doing, but now that I’ve experienced it these past three years, I think I’ve really benefited from a lot of the things I kind of resisted at first. The discipline and order have made me grow up quite a bit, and I’m starting to see the benefits that come with all of that now. 

I think there’s a lot about gymnastics that can be applied to military service, and vice versa. When you get down to it, it’s like doing a routine, because you just have to do the same thing over and over until it’s perfect. Having that work ethic, and learning to give 100% of what you have, even on days when you feel like your body is only at 60%, is really what they’re teaching us both in the gym, and in the military.

INSIDE: What’s a typical day like for a student-athlete at Air Force?

HOOPES: Well, for today, we had to wake up early and be outside, because our squadron had a morning formation. Then, first period starts for me at 7:30 AM and I go to classes until 11:30 AM, and then we go outside onto The Terrazzo to form up as a squads and march to lunch. Some days I’ll have military training in between lunch and practice. If not, I have an hour or so of free time before practice at 2 PM. That goes until 6 PM and then it’s dinner, followed by homework until 9 or 10 PM, and then go to sleep and do it all over again, every day of the week.

INSIDE: Are you the type of gymnast that prefers the day-in, day-out regularity of training, or the thrill of competition?

HOOPES: I’d say I enjoy practice. Those two-three hours of my day where I get to put everything aside and just focus on pommel horse. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it sucks, and I can barely move my arms afterwards, but I actually enjoy that feeling. 

But there’s no feeling in practice that can ever beat the emotion of hitting a good set in a competition with your teammates around you cheering.

I enjoy practice, but the highs of competition can’t be beat by anything else.

INSIDE: You’re a junior this year, where do you see your gymnastics going after next season?

HOOPES: I haven’t thought that far ahead, to be honest. I don’t know where I’m going to be in two years. This could be my last bit in the sport, or I could luck out and get to do the same thing Tim Wang did, where he got to compete another three years after he graduated. 

I try not to think about it, because anything could potentially happen. Some days, I definitely feel like, ‘I can’t do this another four years,’ but others I feel like I want to train for as long as they let me.

We’ll see where it takes me. For right now, I’m just trying to enjoy the ride.

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Photo by Trevor Cokley

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