Why It’s So Astonishing That Suni Lee Is Back at the Olympics (2024)

For American gymnastics fans seeking a less dramatic 2024 quadrennial after the lasting trauma of the Tokyo Olympics, those hopes were summarily decimated as not one, not two, but three presumptive stars of the Paris squad went down one after another with injuries during last week’s Olympic Trials in Minneapolis. Yes, the grueling two-meet competition had its redemptive moments—more on those in a moment—but for the most part, it was an abject bloodbath, and I, for one, have aged approximately 900 years in less than a week because I watched.

First down was Skye Blakely, a vault star whose fluke short landing during podium training on floor exercise ruptured her Achilles, ending her Olympic dreams. The same injury also befell 2024 U.S. Championships all-around bronze medalist Kayla DiCello, this time mid-vault. Then there was the most heart-wrenching: the resplendent Shilese Jones—2023 world bronze medalist and heretofore considered a lock for the squad’s No. 2 spot behind Simone Biles—who, a short time before DiCello got hurt, sustained a knee injury (during general warm-ups, also on vault) that at first seemed minor enough to not take her out of the competition. Indeed, Jones white-knuckled through a beautiful bar routine despite being scarcely able to walk. In the end, however, the injury proved too serious for her to continue, and she withdrew from the Trials as well.

This is all tragic. Blakely, DiCello, and Jones deserve a place in the 2024 cycle. Remember their names; I hope they’ll be back.

Luckily, enough athletes were left standing to field a stellar Olympic team favored for gold in Paris. The five-woman Olympic squad includes four Tokyo veterans whose names you might recall. Joining the always dominant Biles—who, despite two shaky beam routines, won Trials by a 5-point margin in a sport that usually counts tenths—are Jordan Chiles, who has traded her 2021 superhero floor routine for a scorching Beyoncé number I cannot wait to see again; Oregon State star Jade Carey, who has more than earned her spot on the actual team-team after her inscrutable (to a normal person) trip to the Tokyo Games as an “event specialist”; and 16-year-old phenom Hezly Rivera, currently in her literal first year of senior elite competition.

And then, my friends, there is the Olympian I truly did not think I would ever be writing about again in an active-gymnastics context: Tokyo’s individual all-around champion Suni Lee. Scarcely a year ago, Lee was in the midst of a life-threatening, Dr. House–worthy kidney emergency, with Olympic gymnastics honestly the least of her worries. The odds she has beaten—to return not just to healthy condition, and not just to gymnastics at all, but to her second Olympic team in a sport where athletes train a specific sequence of skills, routines, and “peaks” for years, not months—simply cannot possibly be overstated. Lee’s return to the Olympics is gymnastics’ greatest story of the year. It’s an achievement that even surpasses Biles’ return to the mountaintop.

I will never not be awed by Simone Biles’ sheer physics-defying dominance, nor would I ever think of minimizing the immense mental work the GOAT has undertaken to not merely return to her prior greatness but to surpass it. Still, the second Biles felt safe to return, I knew her athletic brilliance would be there (and it is). As successful as Lee has been, there was no such certainty for her—her absence was not so reliant on her mental health as on her physical health.

Last you may have heard Lee’s name, it was likely in 2021, when she captured the all-around gold after Biles’ shocking withdrawal due to the “twisties,” a dangerous vertigo condition. After Lee’s surprise Tokyo win, and thanks to changes in the NIL rules that now allow NCAA athletes to accept corporate sponsorship (and thus continue to fund their elite careers), she enrolled at Auburn University. There, she continued to excel at the collegiate level, although according to a recent Sports Illustrated interview, her teammates were jerks, and people filmed her eating at the cafeteria. Lee scored numerous perfect 10s and even threw a Nabieva on bars, a peak-difficulty skill that is part of her elite repertoire but that the less-difficult NCAA sphere does not usually see. In addition to her luminous presence bringing bodypainted fan-bros into the stands, she was also instrumental in elevating Auburn to national-championship status in the 2022 season while still refusing to rule out a return to elite training for Paris—that was, until she disappeared.

During the 2022–23 regular season, the Auburn sophom*ore announced her withdrawal from the NCAA due to a “non-gymnastics” kidney issue, and if she was spotted at all, it was on the sidelines, looking decidedly unwell. It turned out she was retaining up to 40 pounds of water at times. In late 2023, Lee opened up to Self magazine about some details of her diagnosis, which later would turn out to be two separate incurable kidney diseases, which she has declined to name publicly (because that is her damn business, but also because her diagnoses have fluctuated). Suddenly, this wasn’t about Auburn or Paris—the question was whether she’d ever be able to do gymnastics again.

And yet! Amid many months of “rotting in bed,” innumerable medications, and medical visits of which we (understandably) know little, Lee managed to return to modified training as much as she was physically able and medically allowed. She showed up at the 2023 U.S. Classic looking decidedly wan, but somehow—thanks to a beam routine after which she wept in relief—in decent enough condition to qualify for last year’s national championships. There, she competed bronze-winning routines through what looked like sheer force of muscle memory and will—before her health concerns again forced her to withdraw from the rest of the 2023 season.

Lee was, in fact, only medically cleared to return to training in anything resembling Olympic seriousness in January of this year. This is unheard of. It means she made the Olympic team, in a sport that usually requires years of intense and meticulously timed preparation at the elite level, after six months. If this is possible for you to wrap your head around, gymnastics requires a particular combination of delicacy and rigor in training that is difficult for those outside the sport to fathom. Please trust me: This should have been impossible.

If you’d asked me a year ago if Suni Lee was going to the Paris Olympics, I would have made a very sad face and told you, “Under no circ*mstances.” If you’d asked me six months ago, I would have made a sad but impressed face and said, “It would take a miracle.” Well, guess what? I have never been happier to be wrong.

Lee showed up looking spry at this year’s Classics back in April; that was the first sign that she was on the upswing. My suspicions that she could be a contender were piqued. Then, when she placed fourth all-around at nationals last month, I knew it would be ridiculous to count her out. Even without three of her teammates going down (including DiCello, with whom she is very close), I would have penciled her in. But with those injuries? Well, the second she pulled this bar routine at Trials, she became a shoo-in. It whipped her hometown crowd into a frenzy:

With her bar difficulty back and her endurance returned—this “two-event specialist” showed out on all four apparatuses, with impressive new floor difficulty and gorgeous dance, as well as a not-too-shabby Yurchenko double full vault—the announcement of Lee’s name at the end of the Trials’ deliberation period was, after all she’d been through, not a surprise in the least.

But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t emotional. It was! When NBC correspondent Zora Stephenson asked the newly crowned Team USA for their real-time reactions to being on the roster, Lee broke down in the middle of the word “possible.” And so did the rest of us. Again, I hold Simone Biles’ comeback after 2021 in the highest possible esteem, and always will. And yet, when it comes down to it? Even if Suni Lee returns from Paris without a single medal to her name, this is already the comeback of the decade.