Scouts Meet Olympic Medal Winning Gymnast Alex Naddour

Some of you might not know who Alex Naddour is, but our troop from Queen Creek does. Naddour lives in Queen Creek just like us.

     We were in the middle of earning our "Staying Fit" badge when we heard that Naddour was going to be at the Queen Creek Library before he left for the Olympic Games in Rio. We followed him through the Olympics. He just happened to win a bronze medal on the pommel horse!

     We got lucky enough to meet with Naddour again and ask him some questions. He told us about the Olympic Village with the “giant cafeteria (that had) all different kinds of foods from around the world,” where he go to see Justin Gatlin, Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt. “It was pretty cool,” says Naddour.

     We wanted to know if the weather was as hot as Arizona or better. Naddour replied, “It was not, actually. Right now, because it's on the other side of the world, it's their wintertime. Isn't that weird? But their winter is still pretty warm. It was probably 80 degrees, 90 degrees, and a little humid, and then at nighttime it cooled off a little.”

     Naddour trained eight hours a day in the month before the Olympics—four hours in the morning, lunch, four more hours training, dinner, a team meeting, and then he would go to bed, he told us.

     Naddour even let us hold his bronze medal. It's a lot heavier than you think it will be. We learned that there is hope to see him again in 2020 in Tokyo.

     “I originally was going to be done, but now they have two specialists spots. So I could maybe just do one event and go to the Olympic Games and compete,” Naddour explains. He says he would compete in pommels or rings, “a couple that I'm really good at, and the ones I'm not so good at, that hurt my body, I won't do anymore.”

     Alex, Troop 872 will be cheering for you to be seen again in Tokyo! Let's bring back another medal.

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