Simone Biles Says Donating Kidney to her best friend Was Her Biggest ‘Act of Kindness’. See full story
At her lowest point Suni Lee wasn’t thinking about going back to the Olympics. Just getting out of bed in the morning was hard enough. After a year and a half of uncertainty and depression while battling a pair of career-threatening kidney ailments that led to a weight gain of 45lb on her 5ft frame and kept her out of the gym for months at a time, the Tokyo Olympic all-around champion was ready to call it quits.
For all of the attention devoted to Simone Biles’ extraordinary comeback over the past week, Lee’s return to the sport’s biggest stage has been even more improbable.
On Thursday night, the 21-year-old from Minnesota won the bronze behind Biles’ gold and Rebeca Andrade’s silver in the one of the finest gymnastics meets ever staged, becoming the first Olympic all-around champion to win a medal at the next Summer Games since Nadia Comaneci in 1980.
It wasn’t handed to her. Sitting at fifth in the overall standings through two rotations after a disappointing start on the vault, Lee failed to make up ground on a beam routine where she had mentally faded and needed something special to break into the medal mix on a day when the leaders were bringing their best.
Known for her fluid, elegant routines on the uneven bars, Lee’s podium chances would come down to the floor exercise. That’s when Lee’s longtime coach, Jess Graba, kept it simple: “Win floor, and you’ll win [a bronze],” he said.
From the moment Lee completed her first tumbling pass, a goosebump inducing full-twisting double layout on which she stuck the landing perfectly, the ear-to-ear smile across her face said everything you needed to know.
When her routine was finished and her score of 13.666 flashed on the screen, enough to leapfrog Italy’s Alice D’Amato and Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour and reach the podium by less than two-tenths of a point, Lee covered her mouth in astonishment before embracing the coach who never stopped believing.
“I feel like everything that I’ve done has paid off,” said Lee, who earned a gold medal on Tuesday alongside Biles in the team event. “I mean, literally, six months ago I didn’t even consider I would be here competing today.
That was an achievement in itself. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to be on the podium. To just be here has been absolutely amazing. And I don’t know if you guys could tell, but I definitely got a little emotional after my floor routine. Just seeing the score come up was just insane.”