Champion gymnast Cooper Kim soars after coming out as gay and embracing the ‘zest’
Stanford gymnast Cooper Kim came out to his team and the effects were immediate: NCAA champion, gold medal at the U.S. championships, and most of all, freedom.
Mark
Amidst the bustle of creaking high bars, the smacking of palms on pommel horses and the thud of bodies propelling off spring-fed vaults, Cooper Kim soared through the air with a distinct fluidity.
He stuck the double pike with ferocity and confidence to close out his floor exercise run, his energy met by the crowd gathered to take in the 2026 NCAA Men’s Gymnastics National Championships in April. Kim’s grace gave way to passionate celebration as his Stanford University teammates lost themselves in the moment.
Kim’s performance secured him an individual NCAA national championship on floor exercise and pushed his team to its sixth team NCAA national championship in seven years. He added All-American honors on high bar and vault and would go on to be named an Academic All-American later in the year.
The Cardinal gymnast, clad in that titular color, followed that performance with a bountiful U.S. championships this weekend. Kim left Phoenix with a high bar gold, a top-six finish in the all-around competition, a spot on the U.S. National team and a selection to the U.S. World Championships team as an alternate.
But the lasting images of Kim’s body moving in complete control before giving way to exaltation at the NCAA’s and Nationals proved to be the perfect capstone on a sophomore-year campaign that represented much more than Kim coming into his own in the gym.
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Out gay gymnast Cooper Kim has a golden weekend at U.S. gymnastics championships
Stanford gymnast Cooper Kim, an out gay athlete, dazzled in the high bar at the U.S. gymnastics nationals and made the U.S. team in his quest for the Olympics.
Coming out to be authentic
Near the end of his freshman year at Stanford, Kim — one of the out LGBTQ college athletes being profiled in Outsports’ Campus Courage series — realized that he was putting limits on himself by not authentically expressing himself as the gay man he knew himself to be. In an interview with the NCAA, Kim pointed to his work with a sports psychologist during that period as the catalyst for realizing that he was “only harming himself by not being what I truly wanted to be.”
“Accepting and embracing myself extended beyond my sexuality and was found in the small things that I realized that I was selling out on. The dumb things that I was holding myself back on,” Kim said. “I get mad at myself, thinking, ‘Why was I so worried about that?’ The first step was just being honest with myself and realizing I’m only going to grow from accepting and loving my full self.”
Kim put that realization into action, coming out and openly discussing his identity with his Cardinal teammates during the team’s preseason meetings ahead of his sophomore season.
“I was scared a little going into that meeting because it was uncomfortable for me to be that honest with them and myself, but I’m really glad I brought it up to them,” Kim said. “I think being transparent with them allowed them to be so much more accepting.”
That openness with his team, and a deep relationship with his athletic trainer, took a weight off of Kim and pushed a gymnast who was already turning heads with his potential to not only perform to his own expectations but reimagine his relationship with the sport he fell in love with as a toddler.
“I really wanted to tap into my authentic self and show off my true gymnastics and my true personality in the gym,” Kim told Outsports in April. “[My coaches and teammates] were so supportive of it, and I could tell throughout the season they just let me be me in the gym … not only did it help me in the gym athletically, but also as a person outside the gym. I felt so free. It helped me to excel and tap into the gymnastics that felt right to me.”
Beyond what he communicates with his body during competition, the increased freedom allowed Kim to find his voice outside the gym, expressing his desire to infuse the sport with an artistry that he felt defied discussion of sexual orientation and was mired in gender expectations in athletics.
In a video posted to his Instagram in May, Kim used the evolution of the double pike that closed out his national championship performance as an example of “accepting the zest” of gymnastics rather than the “nonchalant” and “monotonous” approach he noticed in his fellow athletes.
“That’s the approach that I’m taking as a role model: Being artistic in the sport means not considering other people’s opinions. I think that can tie into sexuality, but, in general, I think people need to stop caring so much about what other people are thinking about them … and just show off their gymnastics,” Kim said. “When we tie ourselves to people’s opinions about us and define who we are as a person based off of what other people think about us, it’s a very harming comparison to make.
“It makes you scared and holds you back from really seeing what you bring into the world, and that’s so sad, to think that I was holding myself back so many years.”
Kim clearly isn’t holding back anymore as he heads into his junior season at Stanford, trains with the U.S. National Team and eyes a shot at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
His Instagram reels are littered with images of Kim voguing and doing ballroom dips interspersed with training sequences. He challenges gendered ideas within gymnastics via multiple videos featuring him training on the balance beam. Kim’s expressions of himself are consistently celebrated by his teammates and coaches as he spreads his message that “the goal was never to fit in.”
It exudes the confidence that continues to define Kim’s journey to be the best version of himself. “I’m just trying to be present in this journey and really take in everything,” he said. “It’s exciting, exciting to see where it’ll go, because, no matter what, I’m going to be learning on this journey and will come out a more knowledgeable person.”
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