Three years ago, Sunisa Lee climbed to the pinnacle of gymnastics, earning the sport’s most coveted honor, the Olympic all-around title. She finished the competition in Tokyo with a strong floor routine, then watched as the final scores appeared in the arena. She cried with her coach and posed with her gold medal, proof that she had become the next American to join this exclusive group of history’s best gymnasts.
And yet she has doubts.
“Oh, you didn’t deserve to win,” Lee tells herself.
She knows she’s being hard on herself, but she referenced “the circumstances” of the Tokyo Olympics. Lee won the all-around title by a tiny margin, and she mentioned that if Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, the silver medalist, hadn’t stepped out of bounds after the first tumbling pass of her floor routine — even if only one of Andrade’s feet had crossed the boundary instead of both — she and Lee would have swapped positions on the podium. Then there’s the other glaring factor Lee doesn’t mention: Simone Biles, widely considered the greatest women’s gymnast in history, withdrew from the competition because of a disorienting mental block.
When Lee checks her social media accounts, she sees strangers echoing the critical thoughts that live inside her mind. “Every single day” she said she sees others questioning whether she deserved to win and comparing her with other athletes, so she tries to log off.
“In my head, I already don’t think that I should have won,” Lee said, “so when you see it from other people and that many people saying the same thing over — and that I just suck and all this stuff — it’s very hard mentally.”
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That’s why, as she prepares for the Paris Olympics, Lee feels as if she has something to prove. She wants to prove to herself that she deserves to be on the U.S. team. Despite Lee’s credentials, she’s not guaranteed a spot. A kidney-related health issue severely limited her training over the past year, and the next three competitions, starting with the U.S. Classic on Saturday in Hartford, Conn., will be critical for Lee to showcase that she’s ready.
Shortly after Lee didn’t perform her best in the bars final in Tokyo — she entered as a gold medal contender on her signature event but won a bronze instead — she hinted at a possible return to elite gymnastics. After the Olympics, Lee headed to Auburn and shined through her freshman season in the NCAA. During the summer before her sophomore year, she trained some at her home club in Minnesota. At that point, “I was way better than I was already at the Olympics,” Lee said.
Lee then announced the 2023 college season would be her last at Auburn as she prepared to shift her focus to Paris. Months later, everything unraveled.
Lee woke up one day with swollen ankles, but she shrugged it off, speculating it had been caused by a hard landing. But then her fingers, face and entire body began to feel different, too. At practice, she couldn’t perform the most basic skills. Doctors diagnosed Lee with two kidney diseases. She doesn’t want to disclose the specifics, but she said the health issues are now under control and she’s “in remission.”
For a couple of months, Lee said she struggled to get out of bed. She couldn’t train. She gained about 45 pounds because of how her body was retaining water. Lee was depressed, said her coach, Jess Graba.
“You just don’t know how to handle that,” Graba told reporters before Lee’s season debut in February. “You don’t know how to tell somebody how to handle it. I don’t know how to coach her through it. So basically we’ve been fumbling around a little in the dark and trying to figure it out.”
Lee returned to competition in August 2023, but she performed on just two apparatuses — vault and beam. After nationals, Lee withdrew from the world championships selection event. Lee describes that as her lowest point, and she stopped doing gymnastics for four months.
Then she got a call that changed everything. She won’t share details about the call, but it was important enough that she remembers the exact date: Jan. 4, 2024.
Graba recalled Lee contacting him then to share good news from her doctors.
“She felt like things were trending in the right way so she wanted to start training,” Graba said.
For more than a year now, Lee has been coming to terms with how she has changed from the 2021 version of herself. Even though she says, “I just didn’t think that I was that good,” when talking about the Tokyo Games, she entered the competition as an all-around medal contender. She had placed second, behind Biles, at nationals in 2021. And when Biles had mistakes on the second night of the trials, Lee finished with a higher single-day score.
“I 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,’ ” Lee said.
Her coaches reassure her by saying: “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.”
In mid-April, Lee said her training was still a bit modified, and she doesn’t want to peak too early in the season.
Entering Saturday’s U.S. Classic, the first competition this year that will include all the top contenders, Lee hasn’t performed on all four apparatuses at the elite level since the day she won the all-around title in Tokyo. At an early season meet in February, Lee struggled on bars and beam, usually her best events.
But there have been moments of excellence, too. At a competition last month, Lee scored a 14.300 on beam, a mark that probably would earn a spot in the apparatus final at the Olympics. She did so while performing a simple dismount — a reminder of her potential, scoring so high without her maximum difficulty, but also a sign of how she needs to make progress in the little time remaining before the trials.
When Lee performs her mind-boggling release elements on bars or when she displays her superb execution on beam, it’s clear she is, in many ways, the same gymnast who won the all-around title in Tokyo. She has the gold medal as proof, even if it is locked away in a safe and she doesn’t look at it often.
But while she aims for another Olympics as one of the most decorated athletes in the field, her mind sometimes drifts to those thoughts that she didn’t deserve it. And when asked how she manages to change that internal monologue, Lee said: “I don’t know. That’s something that I’m still working on and learning to accept the fact that I won.”
