It was 12:30 a.m. in Paris before the women’s gymnastics team finals at the 2024 Olympic Games, and Sunisa “Suni” Lee was at the tail end of a mental breakdown.
“It’s like a ritual,” the 21-year-old Glamour Woman of the Year says over Zoom from her apartment in Minnesota. If Lee doesn’t have a good cry the night before a competition, she says, people close to her know something is really wrong. Jordan Chiles must have forgotten that part of her Olympic Village roommate’s routine. “She was like, ‘I’m gonna go get Simone.’”
Yes, Simone Biles. Not many people would wake up the most decorated gymnast in history (herself a past Woman of the Year) to deliver a pep talk the night before her own highly publicized Olympic return. And yet—although Lee implored Chiles to let the GOAT sleep—the gymnast knocked on Biles’s door anyway: “Simone, Suni’s panicking.”
The pressure to deliver another gold medal after the 2020 Tokyo Games (which were held in 2021 due to the COVID 19 pandemic) had become so intense that Lee needed to be reminded she had secured the all-around title just three years ago—the first Asian American athlete to do so. Biles’s midnight advice? “You need to walk around like you’re the reigning Olympic champion, and you need to own it. You need to remind yourself that you’re good enough, and you are on this team for a reason.”
Hours later Suni Lee helped lead Team USA to gold in that team final, earning the group’s top score on the uneven bars and matching the number one of the night on the balance beam. In the days that followed, she’d take home two more individual bronze medals: one for the uneven bars and another for all-around. “Being at the Olympics really made me fall back in love with the sport,” she says.
Comeback stories don’t usually start with taking home gold at the Olympics, but Lee’s triumphs in Tokyo three years ago came after Biles unexpectedly withdrew from the competition. Despite winning gold in the all-around and leading Team USA to silver, Lee didn’t think she deserved her wins—a mindset further fueled by social media. Comments in the vein of “If Simone hadn’t pulled out, she’d have won” played on a loop in Lee’s head.
This anxiety wasn’t just fed by anonymous avatars on social media. Lee’s former Tokyo teammate MyKayla Skinner recently faced backlash for disparaging comments about the 2024 Olympic roster ahead of the Games. “Besides Simone, I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t like what it used to be,” Skinner said in a since-deleted YouTube video, per the New York Post. “Obviously, a lot of girls don’t work as hard. The girls just don’t have the work ethic.”
The Golden Girls—as Lee, Biles, and their teammates called themselves—let their gold medal (and some pointed Instagram comments) speak for them, but Lee was understandably hurt by Skinner’s words. “We have a lot of love for her, but it’s frustrating to see her put us down because she knows, basically, about every single thing that we’ve all been through,” Lee says. “It was more annoying because of all the things that I’ve been through.” (For her part, Skinner addressed the backlash and clarified and apologized for her comments.)
In the year leading up to Paris, Lee had been dealing with much more than imposter syndrome and snarky comments: Just before she turned 20 in early 2023, her life changed overnight. “I woke up and my face was so swollen, my body—I looked in the mirror and knew something was wrong,” Lee says. During practice her fingers barely fit into her grips, and she couldn’t lift her own body. “It literally felt like I had an eight-pound vest on, and I was trying to chuck myself over the bar.”
She went to a doctor and was told it could be allergies. “I gained over 45 pounds in a span of, like, two weeks,” she says. “I wasn’t able to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t bend my legs because they were so swollen, and my fingers too. My eyes were almost swollen shut. I was like, ‘Something is happening.’”
After testing every allergy medication on the market without success (“I’m traumatized by it”), she called USA Gymnastics cohead physician Marcia Faustin, who immediately helped get her tested and diagnosed with two undisclosed types of kidney disease. “It just goes to show the importance of speaking up and advocating for yourself, because if I wouldn’t have, who knows what I would have been doing right now,” Lee says.
Suddenly Lee’s dreams of an Olympic “redemption tour”—her words—felt impossible. She moved back from Auburn University to recover in her hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. She began therapy, journaled, spent time with her family and new puppy Bean. Once she was physically able to step back in the gym after significant time away, she faced a new mental battle with the help of coaches Jess Graba and Allison Lim.
“The hardest thing was just waking up and going to the gym, forcing myself, because a part of me was just so embarrassed and ashamed to show my face,” Lee says. “There are so many little girls in the gym that look up to me, and I just felt I was kind of letting them down, because I wasn’t able to do a lot of things.”
Beam was the first piece of her routine to click back into place, but stamina proved to be a consistent challenge. “Bars, floor, and vault were really hard for me because I couldn’t even walk up a flight of stairs,” Lee says. “My coaches would have buckets ready to go for when I needed to throw up because my medicine made me so nauseous.”
Graba and Lim were always in her corner, especially when she would torture herself with old videos, wishing she were the champion she saw onscreen. “I had to get over the fact that I was never going to be the same gymnast anymore,” Lee says. “My coach would be like, ‘No, you’re this Suni, and you’re a better Suni.’”
Outside the gym, Lee says, her sisters pushed her the most. The oldest biological child of Hmong immigrant Yeev Thoj, Lee scored two older siblings after her mother met and married fellow Laos native John Lee when Suni was two. Lee became her stepfather, and her parents had three more children together. Suni chose to take his last name when she was a teenager.
Lee’s sister Shyenne is only 12 days older but evokes serious big sister energy, protectively listening in on our conversation after helping her sister pack up U-Haul boxes for her then imminent move to New York City. Her best friend, Sera, whom she met through mutual friends when she was in Los Angeles filming Dancing With the Stars in 2021, is hanging out, too, behind her closed bedroom door.
Last summer Sera spent months in Minnesota with Lee, offering moral support. “There was a time when I was really, really down bad,” Lee says. “There were times when I said, ‘Sera, I don’t think I’m gonna make the Olympics.’ She’s like, ‘No, I know you are.’”
Of course, it wasn’t a straight shot from bed rest to an Olympic training regimen. After she competed on beam and vault at the US Classic in August 2023, Lee’s health worsened, and she was forced to take another six months off. It wasn’t until January that her condition stabilized and she was able to fully commit to her training—just seven months before the 2024 Paris Olympics.
At least, that’s the story of record. “Nobody knows this, but the week before the Olympic trials, I had to get an infusion because I went into a relapse,” Lee says. She was getting tired fast, practices were getting harder, and her body was swelling up again. She had to take a little more time off, but the infusion made a “world of a difference,” and she came in second at the Olympic trials in late June, securing her spot on Team USA. “I was able to do everything that I was supposed to do.”
For all the support she received from her family and teammates, Lee has emerged as one of the Golden Girls’ most obvious leaders—and protectors. When Simone Biles was battling her own anxiety in the Olympic Village, Lee would run interference with other competitors. “Everyone wants Simone,” she tells me. “You would think being an athlete, they would understand, but they didn’t. So we would be the ones [telling them], ‘She’s not doing any pictures right now.’ We had her back.”
And as the second-youngest member of the team at 21 years old, Lee was determined to take 16-year-old Hezly Rivera under her wing. “Every morning Hezly and I would go on a walk, we would get coffee, she would have her chocolate muffin, and then we’re making TikToks 24/7,” Lee says. “She’s very quiet in the gym, so we would try and crack jokes. I’m like, ‘You can laugh a little in the gym. It doesn’t have to be serious all the time.’”
Rivera is grateful. “She always reminded me to take a step back and just simply soak in the moment,” she tells Glamour over email. “It helped me appreciate every aspect of my first Olympics experience and recognize how special it was. She is not only a mentor to me but a friend.”
Lee’s links to her teammates remain strong even in the weeks following the Olympics. Though she says she’s “taking a little bit of space” from her cohort—“I don’t need to talk to you every single day to know that we’re friends”—she still FaceTimes Rivera and reached out to Chiles amid her ongoing bronze medal controversy. “I’ve just been trying to make sure that she’s okay and she realizes that she’s absolutely amazing and nothing is going to define her,” Lee says.
(For the uninitiated: Chiles was stripped of her bronze medal on a technicality after confusion about the difficulty of her routine and how quickly Team USA appealed her original score. The International Olympic Committee determined that the medal should be reallocated to Romanian gymnast Ana Bărbosu, despite the fact that no one is questioning the proficiency of Chiles’s routine. Chiles is now appealing the decision.)
I know I speak for millions of Americans when I joke to Lee that if the IOC wants Chiles’s medal back, it will have to go through me. Lee one-ups that: If the IOC came to take it, “I’d throw it in the ocean or something,” she says with a laugh.
On her final day of Olympic competition, Lee fell during her beam routine. While she wasn’t the only one to slip, there was something crushing about the sixth-place finish after she’d checked off all her other goals. “This was the main one, because I always make it into the beam final, and something always goes wrong,” she says. “I was so sad.
“The first thought that came to my head was like, Oh my gosh, I’m about to be a meme on Twitter,” Lee continues. “And then I went on TikTok, and I made one myself. I can make fun of myself because at the end of the day, it’s just a competition.”
It’s all about perspective. “That wasn’t how I wanted to end my Olympics in Paris, and I was a little disappointed, but at the end of the day, I was super proud of myself because I made it to the Olympics,” she says. “I didn’t even think that I was going to be here.
“I’m at such a better place in my life, not even just physically but mentally, to where I can accept everything that’s happened,” Lee continues. “Not many people get to come here twice and compete with the best of the best. I just felt absolutely amazing. And now I’ve learned to really take everything in, and I think that’s why I’m so happy with all of my medals.”
Let’s count them, shall we? Two golds, one silver, and three bronze. “People are like, ‘You shouldn’t be happy. It’s a bronze medal,’” she says, referring to her ranking in this year’s Olympic all-arounds. “But I’m like, ‘You don’t know what I’ve had to go through to get this freaking bronze medal.’”
“Are your medals all packed up for New York?” I ask Lee. They’re not—they’re in their boxes just off camera. The top box turns out to hold her Team USA gold medal from Paris—her proudest achievement. “Just being able to watch all of my teammates accomplish everything they wanted to at this Olympics was so amazing,” she says.
She reads the inscription on the plaque next to her medal: “An Olympic medal is forever, so you can wear your Olympic medalist pin with great pride every day.”
When I speak with Lee, she hasn’t yet signed a lease on her new apartment, but she’s sitting in front of those U-Haul boxes like any other 21-year-old ready to venture into adulthood in the big city. Her only Olympic calling cards are the “USA” on her gray sweatsuit and the sparkling Olympic rings necklace I’m sure is hiding underneath it.
Her next great challenge is more relatable than another gold medal. “I’m very shy and I don’t like to talk to new people, because I get really nervous and awkward and then I get anxiety,” she says. “I don’t know anybody in New York. So yeah, I’m scared.”
Barely a week after our Zoom, she’ll be running around New York Fashion Week, attending shows for designers such as Tory Burch, Off-White, and Michael Kors. Celebs like Olivia Wilde will be starstruck in her presence.
Having designed many of her gymnastics leotards herself, Lee is excited to delve deeper into that world in New York, building on her impressive social media presence and starring in more fashion and beauty campaigns with brands like Cotton x LoveShackFancy and L’Oréal. Other than that, who knows? “It’s always just been gymnastics, gymnastics, gymnastics, whereas right now it’s like, Who is Suni outside gymnastics?”
She answers her own question. “She’s fun, she’s energetic, outgoing, very brave,” Lee says. “But not a lot of people see that, and it’s something that I want to expand on more. I think fashion can be a really good way to express yourself.”
Before you ask, Lee hasn’t found a new gym in New York, nor is she really thinking about the next Olympics. “The whole point of coming back for the last Olympics was to show myself that I could do it.”
If Lee does decide to make a play for Los Angeles in 2028, she’s not looking to embark on another hero’s journey. “I don’t think I would want there to be a huge story,” she says. “I’d just want to work my butt off in the gym every single day and get everything that I deserved at the Olympics. You know? It shouldn’t be deeper than that.
“I don’t need any more adversity,” Lee jokes. “I don’t want people to feel bad for me. I just want to go into the gym and work hard.”
Right now that means living in the moment and learning to take the wins. “That’s something that I’ve learned from gymnastics,” Lee says. “My coach is always telling me, ‘You’re making this harder than it is. You’ve done this a thousand times. Why are you trying to make it into a problem?’ And I’m like, ‘You’re right. Why am I freaking out?’”
The same goes for any new venture. Says Lee, “I just want to have fun with it and do everything that I can to put myself in the best position and then do my thing.”
Stylist: Kat Thomas
Hair: Hiro + Mari
Makeup: Taylor Fitzgerald
Manicure: Kaomong Khang
On-set production: Alexandra Izdebski
Young gymnasts: Chelsea Piers Gymnastics Team
Location Courtesy of Chelsea Piers
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