90NEARLY FOUR MONTHS AFTER U.S.
gymnast Suni Lee won an Olympic gold medal, it was gone.
Well, not gone. She just couldn’t put her hands on it.
After a whirlwind 10 days in Tokyo, and just a few weeks on
campus at Auburn, where she is a freshman, the 18-year-
old Lee moved to Los Angeles to compete
on Dancing With the Stars. She stored
her medals—that gold in the individual
all-around competition, a silver in the
team event and a bronze in the uneven
bars—in a safe in the closet of the two-
bedroom apartment in her extended-stay
hotel. But the safe’s door kept swinging
open when she tried to close it.
“So I’m like, Oh my gosh, I’m just
gonna click ‘lock,’” she recalls. “So then
it locks, and I’m like, Uh-oh. I tried liter-
ally every code—000, 111.” She laughs
and adds, bashfully, “I know.”
Life since the Olympics has been hectic: the reality
show, the photo shoots, the fame. Model Hailey Bieber
now follows her on Instagram. SZA congratulated her on
her performance. She has eaten dinner with The Bachelor’s
Matt James. When Lee pictured life after the Games,
she did not picture any of this. But then, she also never
pictured winning all-around individual gold.
Lee spends time before each meet visualizing her perfor-
mance, trying to work through the nerves. Her imagination
betrayed her in the leadup to Tokyo. “Bad,” she says. “I
fell on every single thing.”
Her anxiety only got worse once the Games began. She
and her family—parents Yeev Thoj and John Lee, and
siblings Jonah, Shyenne, Evionn, Lucky and Noah—had
planned their trip from Minnesota to Tokyo to the last
detail. Then the pandemic hit, and they learned that no
spectators would be allowed to attend. Lee had to compete
with only her coach, Jess Graba, and her teammates on site.
Anxiety made her stomach heave throughout the week
leading up to the team final, and she woke up crying that
morning. “I was so nervous,” Lee says. She reminded her-
self “not to do anything more or anything less because my
normal was good enough.”
It helped that she was competing alongside the great-
est gymnast of all time, Simone Biles, whose dominance
gave the U.S. some margin for error. But after f lubbing
a vault early in the competition, Biles pulled out with
a case of the twisties—essentially, gymnastics vertigo.
Lee, Jordan Chiles and Grace McCallum burst into tears
as Biles explained, right there on the f loor, that she was
withdrawing. Biles’s vault had left the U.S. fighting for
silver. Lee barely had time to panic before realizing that
as the second-strongest gymnast on the team, she was
suddenly the American anchor.
“We knew that this was an opportunity,” Lee says. “This
was an opportunity for us to go out there and show people
that we were meant to be on the Olympic team, not just
because Simone was gonna carry us through.”
Amid the chaos Lee chose the more difficult of her twopossible uneven bars routines and nailed it, earning a
career-high 15.400. A few minutes later she added a 14.133
on the balance beam, the second-highest score of the night.
Lee had been scheduled to compete in only those two
events, but the U.S. needed her on the f loor exercise as
well. Nursing injuries to her left foot and ankle, she had
not practiced her f loor routine in three days. But Graba
reminded her, “We’ve done this a million times. You were
meant to be here. Go out there. Do your thing.” She scored
13.666 to preserve second place.
She felt the team had won silver. She feared fans would
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Nursing injuries to her left foot and ankle,
Lee had not practiced her floor routine in
three days. But Graba reminded her, “We’ve
done this a million times. YOU WERE MEANT
TO BE HERE. Go out there. Do your thing.”