Exclusive - Suni Lee reflects on difficult year: "It taught me that I'm a lot stronger than I think I am"
U.S. gymnast Suni Lee finally feels like she’s back on the right track.
The Tokyo 2020 all-around gold medallist spent the last nearly 12 months adjusting to the realities of a kidney-related health concern that ended her NCAA career at Auburn University early and prevented her from making a run at international competition months later.
Now, she has once again found a consistent rhythm to her training.
“I’ve been back in the gym every single day, eight hours a day, and it’s been going pretty well,” Lee told Olympics.com in an exclusive interview ahead of her 2024 competitive debut at the Winter Cup, Saturday (24 February) in Louisville, Kentucky.
“I’m in remission right now, so I’ve just been getting it under control and starting to work up into routines and getting ready for the season.”
In Louisville, Lee plans to compete on the uneven bars and balance beam only. Her goal there: earn a spot at the upcoming Baku World Cup competition where she can submit an original element she showed the world last month on her social media – a full twisting layout Jaeger catch-and-release move on the uneven bars – to be named in the sport’s rule book.
“I feel really prepared on beam,” Lee said. “Bars… I’m feeling pretty good. We’re kind of just going to get the skill named and then doing a basic bars set. I’m just doing Pak through [to the end of the routine].”
Lee’s confidence ahead of competition belies the struggles she’s faced.
The 20-year-old competed vault and balance beam in August 2023’s U.S. Classic and U.S. Championships, but withdrew from Team USA’s World Championships and Pan Am Games selection competition a month later, ending her season and beginning a difficult five-month period from which she and longtime coach Jess Graba say she’s only recently emerged.
“I had kind of a rough patch, and I was in and out of the gym for about five months,” Lee says.
“It was more just mental, but also trying to figure out my health and just be as healthy as possible coming into the new year because I knew I wanted to not have to worry about it as much, or, like, just make sure that I was going into remission and not going to have a little break out before a big meet.”
But without gymnastics as an outlet, Lee and Graba say times were tough.
“Being depressed,” says Graba in response to a question about how Lee filled her days when she couldn’t make it into practice.
“During that time, I was honestly not doing a lot of anything good for me, I was just kind of rotting in my bed and hoping that it would all go away,” adds Lee, later saying, “Things are definitely way better now. Of course, I still have to go to the doctors every couple of weeks. I just got an infusion. But they said that I’ve been progressing a lot.
“I’ve been able to wake up every single day and I’m perfectly fine,” she continued. “I also have been doing this for long enough now, I think, to know the right time to take my medicine, to be able to be perfect for in the morning.”
Sunisa Lee: “A big goal for a point was just to make it in the gym for a week”
Through the tough times, Lee has had to learn how to ask for and accept help from those around her.
“I’ve really just been depending on my support system because during that time, I was kind of pushing everybody away,” admits Lee. “I think that it started making things worse because I was just feeling really lonely, but the more that I just let everybody in, just like asking for help and letting people help me, it was one of the biggest things.”
“I think a lot of it for her, too, was … she didn’t have a purpose,” Graba says. “When you don’t have a purpose, it’s really hard to get out of bed in the morning. And, she’s a people person, so hiding yourself away and avoiding people was not healthy for her. It took a little coaxing to get her to at least come out of her shell and come in and do something else with her day.”
Lee is quick to credit Graba with keeping her grounded.
“Jess has to snap me into reality all the time,” she says. “He’s part of the reason why I got back out of my slump.”
“It was a lot of struggle for her and for us,” admits Graba. “How do you communicate? Because we really don’t care if she does gymnastics but it makes her feel better, so it’s kind of important to her.
“It was really hard to get herself to believe that she could make a run at it again,” he continued. “I think that part of it, the first couple weeks was really hard right after Christmas.”
Lee has also had to accept the necessity of smaller goals, ones that build on each other to get her where she ultimately wants to be later this summer.
“Just like trying to make smaller goals instead of just thinking about the Olympics right away,” she said of her approach. “Just taking it day-by-day, step-by-step, not trying to make everything perfect right away.”
To say it’s been an adjustment is an understatement.
“A big goal for a point was just to make it in the gym for a week,” Lee says through a nervous laugh. “That was a hard one for me because I was coming in two days, and then they wouldn’t see me for another two weeks.”
Enter her somewhat singular goal that starts this week at Winter Cup and, hopefully, continues the World Cup in Baku next month, to add her name to the sport’s Code of Points.
“I’m feeling a lot better [now],” Lee says. “I honestly haven’t really been thinking about the Olympics. I feel like my biggest goal right now is to get this skill named in Baku, that’s just been the only thing on my mind.
“So, I think just focusing on what I want – because I know that if I just put my mind to something – then I can achieve it,” she continued. “I think that I’m starting to see that clearly now, so I’m just going to keep doing that for every meet.”
Quality over quantity
As Lee enters the final year of her second Olympic cycle, she’s leaning on the countless hours spent in the gym as a teenager.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a lot easier physically, but I think that… I guess it helped that I did all the numbers and repetitions in the gym back then because now, I don’t have to do as much to try and maintain and to get better at things,” explained Lee. “It’s more like quality over quantity at this point.”
Adds Graba: “She can snap back pretty fast because of all of her training that she can lean on and those experiences.”
Though Lee will focus on uneven bars and balance beam in the early part of the season, the three-time Olympic medallist is training all four events as they try to build her strength for the summer.
Graba says Lee has only been training seriously for a little over a month, but he feels good about where his star pupil is.
“We can take our time because we’re noticing that a lot of her training that we did when she was 13, 14, 15, comes back so quickly that now we can take our time and be very patient with it,” says Graba. “Before we were in a hurry it felt like all the time because we were always behind. Now, I feel like her muscle memory and her skill memory is there. We just have to be patient and let it happen.”
Something else Lee has now in spades: a mature perspective after the most difficult year of her life.
“It’s definitely taught me and shown me that I’m a lot stronger than I think I am,” she said. “I’ve gone through a lot this year…. It’s just crazy to think about.”