Cooper Kim’s remarkable 2026 has reached another level.
The openly gay Stanford gymnast won the national championship on high bar at the Xfinity U.S. Gymnastics Championships in Phoenix while earning his first place on the U.S. Senior National Team.
For the 20-year-old, the achievement comes only months after he publicly embraced his identity as a gay athlete.
Kim produced the strongest high-bar performance of the weekend, becoming the only competitor to score above 15 points on both days of competition.
His combined score of 30.936 secured the national title.
He also finished sixth in the all-around standings and fourth on floor exercise.
Those results earned Kim a place on the 2026–27 U.S. Senior National Team.
He was also selected as a replacement athlete for the U.S. team heading to the 2026 World Championships.
Before that, Kim will represent the United States at the Paris World Challenge Cup in September.
The results represent another major step toward the goal that has been quietly sitting in the background throughout his rise: competing at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
Kim’s breakthrough did not begin in Phoenix.
Earlier this year, he helped Stanford capture the NCAA men’s gymnastics team championship.
He also won the individual NCAA title on floor exercise and earned All-America honors across multiple events.
His floor routine stood out not simply because of its difficulty but because of the personality and artistry Kim brought to it.
That freedom of expression has become an important part of his story.
Before Stanford’s 2026 season began, Kim told his coaches that he wanted to stop holding parts of himself back.
That included being more open about being gay.
Rather than discovering that openness was a distraction from elite sport, Kim found the opposite.
He later told Outsports that his coaches and teammates responded with support and allowed him to be himself in the gym.
Kim said that acceptance helped him both personally and athletically.
He described feeling freer and finally being able to perform gymnastics in a way that felt genuinely his.
The NCAA later profiled Kim during Pride Month, where he spoke more extensively about the journey toward accepting himself.
He said therapy and work with a sports psychologist helped him recognize how much energy he had spent worrying about other people’s opinions.
Eventually, he began to understand that accepting his sexuality was part of accepting everything else that made him who he was.
That process coincided with the best gymnastics of his career.
Kim has been particularly outspoken about artistry in men’s gymnastics.
He rejects the idea that expressiveness in the sport should automatically be associated with sexuality.
Instead, he argues that gymnastics becomes more exciting when athletes stop worrying about how they are perceived and allow their own personality into their routines.
His performances this year have offered a compelling demonstration of that philosophy.
At the NCAA Championships, it helped produce a national title on floor.
At the U.S. Championships, his technical confidence and fluidity on high bar produced another gold medal.
After the competition in Phoenix, Kim reflected on both parts of his journey.
He said he was grateful to make the U.S. Senior National Team, earn a World Championships alternate position and receive an international assignment.
But he also said he was proud of himself for continuing to accept who he is and believing that he is capable of extraordinary things.
Kim was not the only openly gay male gymnast competing in Phoenix.
Ben Letvin of Minnesota and Charlie Larson of Michigan were also at the championships.
Letvin finished 18th in a field of 42 competitors and said afterward that he had achieved the goals he set for the meet.
Larson competed on the opening day but was unable to continue on Day 2 because of an injury.
The championships marked the first time Kim, Letvin and Larson had all been together at the same competition as openly gay athletes.
That visibility is notable in a sport where relatively few elite male competitors have historically been publicly out.
Kim’s success offers a particularly powerful counterpoint to the old assumption that athletes must separate their identity from performance in order to succeed.
His experience at Stanford suggests that sometimes the opposite is true.
Removing the effort required to hide can leave more room to perform.
Kim is still early in his senior international career and a place on the 2028 Olympic team is far from guaranteed.
American men’s gymnastics currently has considerable depth, and Olympic selection will ultimately depend on performances much closer to the Los Angeles Games.
But he has now done something that matters enormously on that road.
He is a U.S. national champion.
He is a member of the national team.
And he is beginning to receive opportunities to represent his country internationally.
Only months after publicly embracing life as a gay athlete, Cooper Kim is no longer simply talking about what might happen if he stops holding himself back.
He is showing us.
📷 @coop\.kim
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