PARIS — Three years ago, an Olympic bronze medal in the uneven bars left Suni Lee almost in tears from disappointment. On Sunday, the same result left her incandescent with joy.
She spent the two years, 364 days since this event in Tokyo stewing about a series of mistakes that left her in third only by attrition as other competitors made worse errors. But in Paris, competing in what her coach, Jess Graba, called “the best bars final I’ve seen in I don’t know how long,” she made herself proud.
“Last time I got a bronze medal, but I didn’t feel like I deserved it because of the routine that I did,” she said afterward. “I told myself this time that even if I don’t make the podium or medal, I’m gonna be happy with whatever I get if I do the routine that I was supposed to do, and that’s why I feel like I’m so much more happy this time.”
Kaylia Nemour, representing Algeria, won gold. Qiyuan Qiu, of China, took silver. This bronze gave Lee six Olympic medals—the two bars bronzes, gold in the individual all-around in Tokyo and in the team final this week, silver in the team final in Tokyo and bronze in this week’s all-around—and tied her with Aly Raisman for third most-decorated U.S. gymnast of all time. With a medal in the balance beam final on Tuesday, she can tie Shannon Miller for second with seven. Only Simone Biles, with 10, has more.
“That’s crazy,” said Lee, 21, who had not realized the extent of her accomplishment. It’s especially meaningful for someone who has referred to this three-year quadrennial as her “redemption tour.”
It might be hard to understand why the defending Olympic all-around champion might believe she needs to redeem herself. But Lee never imagined winning that medal, and frankly she didn’t really want it.
“We didn’t even think I would be in the running for all-around [gold],” she told SI in the leadup to these Games. “Everybody knew if you’re competing against Simone [Biles], you’re competing for second place.”
Lee had set her sights on the apparatus finals in her two favorite events, the uneven bars and the balance beam. But in the whirlwind after the all-around, she struggled, finishing third in the bars and fifth in the beam. So for the past three years, instead of thinking about what she had done, she thought about what she hadn’t.
It did not help that her transition back to real life was rocky at best. She had dreamed of being a normal college student, and she matriculated at Auburn, but she was a phenomenon who had already been on Dancing with the Stars and to the Met Gala. She had to stop eating at the cafeteria because people kept taking videos of her. She dealt with stalkers. She stopped going to class in person altogether, doing online school instead.
She struggled to bond with her Auburn gymnastics teammates, she told SI, feeling that everyone expected her to hit every routine. “I just really felt like an outcast, almost,” she said. “They didn’t treat me that well. I just knew that I couldn’t trust them.”
So when she woke up one morning in February 2023, midway through her sophomore season, with swollen ankles that metastasized into a bloated body, she did not feel she could tell her teammates what was going on. She gained 40 pounds as doctors fought to pinpoint a cause. She moved home. “I was just rotting in bed,” she said. Eventually they identified two separate kidney conditions, which she will have to manage for the rest of her life.
Last April, when doctors allowed her to return to activity, Graba was not thinking about the comeback she had been insisting she would make, to redeem herself from that mistake-pocked bars routine in Tokyo. He just wanted her back in the gym so she would leave her room and stop searching her name on Twitter. They modified her training based on what she could manage each day. By the time doctors told her she could come off some of her medications, in January, the Olympics were eight months away.
At times she said she might quit. “O.K.,” Graba told her. This was not reverse psychology: “I was gonna try to talk her into quitting,” he said. “I was like, ‘You maybe should.’”
“I was like, ‘What do you mean, O.K.?’” Lee said. “And he was like, ‘You don’t have to do this.’ Him saying that made me want it even more. I was like, ‘If he’s O.K. with this, I’m not O.K. with it!’”
Sometimes she complains that she is a different person than she was three years ago. Good, Graba tells her, pointing to all the ways she has grown. She is beginning to see those changes, too. In Tokyo, she shut down every time she disappointed herself. Now, “I'm just learning to give myself so much grace,” she said. “We weren’t even supposed to be here.”
She has changed her perspective so much that she came into Sunday rooting for someone else: “I really wanted Kaylia to get a win, just because she’s so incredible,” Lee said. As for herself: “I’m just really happy that I’ve been able to handle the pressure this time around.”
Everything that happens now is a victory. Even third place.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as After All She’s Been Through, Suni Lee’s Bronze in Bars Is a Special Medal.
