Olympic gymnastics champion Suni Lee: ‘Proving it to myself’

Gymnastics is a game of precise angles, six degrees of separation between Simone Biles and disaster.

Suni Lee has spent thousands and thousands of hours working to perfect a handful of gravity- and imagination-defying moments with the world watching.

The problem is no one told her what to do after she stuck the landing.

Lee was the most surprising winner of the Tokyo Olympic Games, capturing the all-around gold medal, arguably the most storied title in all of women’s sports, after overwhelming pre-Games favorite Simone Biles withdrew due to a case of gymnastics vertigo known as “the Twisties.”

“I feel like people get it mixed up,” Lee said. “I don’t care about the money and the fame. All I wanted to do was go to the Olympics. I didn’t want anything that came after it. The only thing I wanted was the Olympics. So after that happened, when I was in the media at the time, it was really hard for me to deal with. I got so distracted, because I was like, ‘Whoa, SZA just followed me!’ “

“It was just crazy stuff.”

Lee did the usual post-Olympic victory laps; a tour of morning and late night talk shows, a spin on “Dancing with the Stars.” She signed endorsement deals with L’Oreal, Sony, Marriott, Gatorade, Amazon, Crocs, Target and Lego.

“I guess I didn’t realize that everybody watched the Olympics,” she said.

But Lee also found out that fame has a flipside.

She has been dismissed by many as an accidental Olympic champion, as if an asterisk should be attached to her gold medal.

She has spent the last three years in an echo chamber, hounded by a constant, if misguided, chorus of, “If Simone hadn’t…” and “what ifs” and “if onlys.”

Lee returns to the spotlight this weekend at the U.S. Olympic trials at the Target Center in Minneapolis across the Mississippi River from her hometown of St. Paul having tuned out all but one of her critics.

“I feel like this time is more proving it to myself,” Lee said. “Because you know, of course, in the back of my head I think, ‘Oh, you didn’t deserve to win.’ And I told myself that so much because of the circumstances. But that’s just me being hard on myself, because I’m going to be my biggest critic. This time is more proving it to myself and proving that I deserve to be on the Olympic team. Not so much like I need to go out there and win it again, like I need to prove (something to) these people that told me that I didn’t deserve to win. It’s more proving to myself that I deserve to make the Olympic team and that I deserve to be there with all the other athletes.”

Biles arrived at Tokyo the biggest favorite of the Games, winner of four gold medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics, including the individual all-around title. She had also won five World Championships all-around crowns, 19 Worlds gold medals in total.

Lee, then 18, thought winning a team gold and maybe a second gold on the uneven bars was her ceiling in Tokyo.

“I really want to redeem myself after last time, to get a freaking bars (gold) medal and a beam medal!” Lee said laughing, referring to her Olympic bronze medal performance on the uneven bars. “That was the original goal.

“We didn’t even think I would be in the running for all-around (gold). Everybody knew if you’re competing against Simone, you’re competing for second place.”

But after experiencing spatial awareness issues on the vault on Team USA’s first rotation in the team final, Biles withdrew from the competition citing mental health concerns. In her absence, the U.S. fell to Russia, marking the first time since 2010 that the American women did not win that team title at the Olympic Games or World Championships. A day later, Biles withdrew from the individual all-around event as well.

Biles’ absence also created an unsettling sense of uncertainty for Lee and many of her fellow competitors. For the first time since Biles emerged on the international scene in 2013, the field wasn’t just competing for the silver medal.

“I just had to shift gears,” Lee said. “Because before we’re coming in here to compete for second place. So when the opportunity was there, I had to do what I normally do because I feel like, I’ve been second to (Biles) so many times, I just do what I do because otherwise it would get into my head.”

In that regard, Lee was perhaps more equipped to adjust than her rivals.

Lee likely would not have made the U.S. team had the Olympics been held as scheduled in 2020. She missed two months last year with a broken left foot, and another two months with an Achilles tendon injury. She won the 2019 U.S. Championships uneven bars title while competing with a hairline tibia fracture. She dedicated that victory to her father John, who only weeks earlier became paralyzed from the chest down after falling off a ladder.

Lee also lost an aunt and uncle to COVID-19 in 2020.

“The past few years have been absolutely crazy with COVID and my family and everything else,” she said. “This medal definitely means a lot to me because there was a point in time where I wanted to quit and I just didn’t think I’d ever get here (because of) injuries and stuff.

“So there were definitely a lot of emotions, but I’m super proud of myself for sticking with it.”

With Biles watching the Olympic all-around competition at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre, Lee was solid all night and then had to endure a few final nervous moments while Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, second at the time, finished her floor routine. When Andrade stepped out of bounds on the final step of her final tumbling pass, the gold medal was Lee’s.

“It feels crazy, it is so surreal,” Lee, the first U.S. Olympic champion of Hmong descent, said that night. “It’s a dream come true. I don’t even know what to say. It hasn’t even sunk in.“It doesn’t even seem like real life.”

Little since that golden night in Tokyo would.

She enrolled in Auburn in August 2021 to be coached by Jeff Graba, twin brother of her longtime club coach Jess Graba.

But she was stalked at Auburn and said because of security concerns she had to take classes online.

“Online school was really boring,” Lee said.

At times it seemed like there was no place where she could find peace on campus. She stopped going to the cafeteria after discovering that students were filming her eating and then posting the videos on social media.

“It was so weird,” she said.

Lee didn’t feel any more comfortable with her Auburn teammates.

“A lot of the girls weren’t the nicest to me,” she said. “I just really felt like an outcast, almost. They didn’t treat me that well. I just knew that I couldn’t trust them.”

Then in February 2023, she began experiencing what doctors would later diagnose as two rare kidney diseases. Lee has declined to talk about the specifics of the condition. Because her kidneys weren’t processing water and waste retained excess fluid to the point where at times she was 40 pounds over her normal weight.

“I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror,” Lee said. “I didn’t even recognize myself.”

She stopped training in March 2023. A month later she moved back home to Minnesota.

“I was just rotting in my bed,” Lee said. “I couldn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t leave the house.”

Eventually she was cleared for limited physical activity and slowly worked her way toward returning to training. Some days she could only bounce on a trampoline because her eyes were almost swollen shut.

By August, she was back at the U.S. Championships, taking third on the balance beam. She chose not to attend a selection camp for the World Championships, citing her kidney condition.

But Lee, declining to go into specifics, said a January 4 conversation with her doctors gave her confidence that she could earn a place on Team USA this week.

She was fourth in the all-around at the U.S. Championships earlier this month in Fort Worth despite a rare mistake on the vault. Her second day score on the balance beam (14.900) would have won last year’s World Championships.

“My doctor was telling me he didn’t think I’d be able to do gymnastics ever again, so to even be here is an accomplishment in itself, Lee said. “And I’m super proud of myself. I try not to listen to the outsiders because people don’t know what my diagnosis is.

“I don’t feel ready to expose that until after (the Olympics). Right now I’m in remission and excited to get back out there.”

But it wasn’t just her kidneys that Lee had to heal.

“There’ve been so many moments in the past couple of years where I’ve just been doubting myself,” she admitted.

“I definitely talk to my therapist a couple of times a week. It’s something that I prioritize a lot now, because it has helped me the most. And talking to my coach too, he’s basically like my dad and we’re super, super close. He’s always been there throughout the whole journey. I think communicating is important for all of us, too, because we all don’t really know what we’re doing. My coaches have never had to deal with someone who has had (kidney disease) and obviously, I’m like, ‘Okay, I don’t know any other gymnasts that have two kidney diseases that has had to go through this.’

“So it’s all a learning process.”

That the Olympic trials are in her backyard has only made that process harder.

“It’s definitely a lot more pressure; a lot more nerve-racking,” Lee said in an interview in April. “I’ll be walking the streets and people are like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ll see you at trials.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, hopefully. If I make it there.’ So it’s really nerve-racking.”

And so there are days when Lee feels golden, days when she soars with the freedom she felt before Tokyo, before her kidneys failed her.

And there are days when she can silence all her critics but the one in the mirror.

“I still struggle with that daily,” she said. “I mean, whenever I’m talking to my coaches, I always get really sad because I’m like, ‘I’m never going to be the same. I’m not the same Suni, not the same athlete.’ And they’re like, ‘Good! You don’t want to be. You’re doing everything and more right now. And you should be proud of the way that you’ve been able to come back from everything, because you never thought that you would be in this position.’

“And I was like, ‘You’re so right!’ It’s just hard mentally because I’m like, ‘Wow, I was in a really good spot last year or last Olympics getting ready.’”