Team USA’s Eddie Penev on winning titles, tight uniforms & reaching his highest peak
Eddie Penev is a gay gymnastics great.
Mark
Eddie Penev doesn’t like to use the word “retire.”
After a decade-plus career, the Team USA gymnast still spends most of his waking hours inside of the gym. Born into a gymnastics family, Penev started the sport when he was three and has remained aerial ever since. At Stanford, he won three national championships and five All-Americans, qualifying for the U.S. National Team his senior year.
From there, Penev spent eight years at the Team USA’s Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. During that time, he experienced numerous highs and lows. Championship wins were followed by ACL tears, keeping him away from Olympic competition. Still, Penev describes the experience as a dream come true.
He finished his career competing for Bulgaria, where he was born. That was another highlight, and allowed Penev to reconnect with his family.
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Now coaching at his parents’ gym in Upstate New York, he’s ready for his next triumph. “I don’t like the word ‘retire,'” he tells Queerty. “I’m not 65!”
Penev, who’s 35, says he gleans motivation from tennis great Serena Williams. Rather than “retire” from her sport, the 23-time Grand Slam champ simply says she’s evolving into another chapter.
For Penev, that includes traveling the world, publishing his own hiking guide and living life as an out and proud gay man!
In between gym sessions (Penev still trains every day), Queerty recently caught up with the World Cup champion to talk about his career and next chapter. Here’s what he had to say…
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QUEERTY: You competed at such a high level! What’s one thing about gymnastics that people don’t know about?
This may be a generic answer, but the amount of hours it takes and how long you’ve prepared for the moment. Gymnastics is not a sport that you can pick up when you’re 12 years old. You have to start really young to get to the highest levels. The amount of sacrifice, the hours you put in. You sacrifice school events, time with friends, sleepovers. All of that stuff. It takes so long to get to the [highest] level, and few people do.
What were your career highlights?
I made it to the 2016 Olympic trials. I’ll never forget it. It was a packed stadium. It was so loud in there! Even though I didn’t make the Olympic team… I was new to the team and had kind of an outside shot. Competing in that atmosphere was unreal. Winning the national championship at Stanford was incredible. Then the 2021 U.S. Championships right before I got injured. I hit the best floor routine of my life. It was one of those ones you dream of doing. To put it on the competition floor, they compared it to Simone Biles. It was really cool!
What’s your favorite routine?
I got a skill named after me at the 2011 World Championships in Tokyo. I was the first person to do it. They go by your last name, so they call it the “Penev.” It’s a laid out, double Arabian with a half twist. You jump in the air, do a half twist, do two somersaults forward with another half twist at the end. That was cool! I’ve used that skill in my routines on and off. I used it last year. There’s a book with all of the skills and they’re all depicted by little figures. It’s nice, because you see all of these famous names that people know in the sport. You’re part of gymnastics history.
What was it like competing for Bulgaria?
The first time, pre-college was really cool. It put me on the international stage of gymnastics and showed me a higher level. Then the second part was a great way to cap off my career. In the three years after my ACL tear, I didn’t know if I could ever reach that high level again, and I did. It was a nice way to end my career. I got nine World Cup medals, three gold [medals]. Bulgaria is a very different kind of county, but it’s where I came from. It’s my home. The gymnastics was great, but it was an opportunity to reconnect with a lot of my family that lives over there. That superseded everything else. And it was fun to travel. With Team USA, you have this group of guys—there’s 15 on the national team and they have to distribute competitions to everybody. Whereas Bulgaria is smaller, so I got to go to the entire World Cup circuit and travel all over the world. It was really fun.
Speaking of traveling, you’ve competed around the world and visited 34 countries. Which experiences stand out?
I love the mountains, because I lived in Colorado for so long. Love the mountains, One of my favorite places in Europe is Switzerland. I love Switzerland. I got to see the Swiss Alps, and that was just like heaven. But equally impressive are the Canadian Rockies—the BANFF area. Yoho National Park and Jasper. One of my friends was doing her post-doc out there. It was such a memorable trip. Then for non-mountains, I’m obsessed with Hawaii. I’ve been there several times!
Do you have any travel necessities?
If we’re giving a practical answer, my wall plug with all of the different conversions. But I also love having gummy bears. This is a ritual of mine. Whenever I’m traveling or competing, I have to have Haribo gummy bears with me. The ones you get in Germany, the actual Haribo ones, they taste so much better. A lot of money has spent duty-free in Germany on Haribo products!
The gymnastics uniform, I have to ask: Do you like it, or wish it were baggier?
I’ve gotten used to it. It’s evolved a lot from when I first started. They’re less restricted, the material is more breathable. They used to like a leotard back in the day—tighty-whities kind of bottom. But now the bottom part is more like boxer briefs, like wrestlers would wear. But I would like looser shorts. You wear pants in some events and shorts in some events. The pants sometimes feel a little weird. Doing high bar at a competition, you feel the flopping a little more. The pants are a little stranger sometimes. But they’re tight to judges can evaluate form. There was a gymnast who was trying to change the uniform and wanted to wear a tank kind of thing. They were like, “Yeah, you can wear it domestically, but you’re gonna get a deduction at the end of the competition.”
Ah, they want to judge your form. That’s why I like men in tight clothes, too! When you’re not in the gym, what do you do for fun?
I love reading, writing, all of that stuff. I’m hoping to get a book published. During [2020], the gym was shut down and we were in isolation for such a long time. I did a bunch of the local hikes. Everything we did had to be approved. One of the things they said was, you could do hikes. So I exhausted the local hikes and thought, “It would be nice to be gone for the whole day.” In Colorado, we have these things called “14ers.” There are these 14,000 mountains, and there’s 58 of them—72 in the whole country, lower 48 [states]. I did one, and I was like, “That was exhausting.” Then I did more and more and more. In three years, I finished all 58. Some of them are as easy as a hike, and for others you need technical gear. It’s like mountaineering. So I’ve transitioned into mountaineering. It drove my coaches crazy at first, but then they saw the fitness effect it had. When we got back into the gym after three months off, I still looked like a gymnast. It kind of became a thing. Now I’m like, “What will be next?” I was journaling when I was doing them, and now the journal has turned into a book.
It helped me overcome a lot of things. I think you climb mountains for metaphorical reasons. It’s not just about getting to the summit. It helped me, especially after I tore my ACL before the Olympic trials. I didn’t know if I wanted to come back to gymnastics. But I was motivated to do the rehab so I could get back out there. I was in the middle of finishing the 58 [mountains]. They kept me from going into dark places mentally. It was something to work towards, even though there was so little that was positive in my life. Your problems, you can leave them at the car. When you’re standing on top of them, you look down and see the world in a totally different lens. You’re like, “Wow, we’re just specs on the earth.”
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