Suni Lee's Journey Back to Gymnastics

[aubiefifty 18,508]

si.com

Suni Lee's Journey Back to Gymnastics After Olympic Gold, Kidney Disease

Stephanie Apstein

14–18 minutes

Suni Lee would rather not be wolfing down her sandwich in this hotel room in midtown Manhattan, but it’s 3 p.m. and this is her first meal of the day, 17 hours removed from her fourth competition since a pair of kidney conditions left her worried she would never live a normal life. Between bites she gets her hair teased and her makeup applied, calculating how many hours of sleep she can get after her photo shoot, after she gets her lash extensions removed, before she wakes at dawn to have new, lighter extensions applied to fit the look of the brand for which she has a photo shoot scheduled the next day, before she flies home to St. Paul to resume training for what she hopes will be her second Olympics.

She does not have to be doing any of these things, and sometimes she pauses to imagine “reality, what my life is gonna be like after,” she says. “I can eat whatever I want. I can go anywhere, anytime. I don’t have to miss anything because of practice. Hang out with my friends. Have fun. Travel. I love that kind of lifestyle. And I’m so excited.” Lee always thought she would be doing all that right now. So did her coach, Jess Graba. After competing at the Tokyo Games, Lee planned to spring into life as a freshman at Auburn. But she shocked the world—no one more than herself—by winning gold in the all-around event. Suddenly, everything changed, and not always for the better.

In the aftermath, she locked her medal in a safe. She says she can’t remember the last time she took it out. And yet she finds herself drawn to pursue another one.

“I honestly forget that I won the Olympics sometimes,” she says softly.

Sometimes, the only thing harder than winning Olympic gold is everything that comes next.

Athletes have warned one another about post-Olympic depression for many years, and a growing body of research has identified the condition as a real threat, one that team mental health staffers are taking seriously. But post-gold depression offers a slightly more complicated experience. If you did not achieve your goal, you can feel disappointed in the result in addition to feeling lost as you contemplate what comes next for you. But what about when you did achieve it?

“You expect it to be this huge life-changing moment,” says Ryan Crouser, who won gold in shot put in Rio in 2016 and Tokyo five years later. “And it is. But you spent years and years and years putting that moment on this pedestal. It’s especially difficult because everyone expects you to be like, up here.” He raises his right hand above his head.

“But from a neurological standpoint,” he says, “you’ve just had the biggest dopamine hit of your entire life, winning the Olympics, standing on the podium. And you’re going through a massive, massive dopamine withdrawal. So you think you should be happy, and everyone around you says you should be, but your brain has no dopamine. And you’re way down here”—he lowers his hand to his waist—“and you just feel bad.”

Crouser set an Olympic record en route to his gold medal in Tokyo. / Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

The post-Olympic blues that Crouser describes were the subject of a 2022 study published in the journal Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, which sampled a group of 14 Olympians from the United Kingdom and detailed similar sentiments: “The somewhat ethereal nature of the experience had negative undercurrents, as the athletes talked about how the dream concurrently became a nightmare [that] involved internal conflict, media intrusion, the perception of the Games as an anti-climax, feelings of isolation, and failure to meet their own and  others’ expectations.”

Even when you emerge from that fog, you might find that things are not quite as you left them—especially others’ perception of success. “I get a lot of questions I don’t like,” says Lee Kiefer, who in Tokyo became the first U.S. fencer to win gold in foil. “For instance, You’re gonna win in Paris, right? I’m like, I mean, that’s not everything. I’m gonna try!” She does not like the idea that the four years leading up to an Olympics become a failure if they do not end atop the podium.

Nevin Harrison—who became the first American woman to win a canoe or kayak title with a gold in the 200-meter sprint in Tokyo as a 19-year-old—struggled when she got home and realized that was all anyone wanted to talk to her about.

“I’d like to not have that be my entire personality,” she says. “I’ve found the most genuine friendships are the ones [involving people] that don’t necessarily care.”

For Lee, 21, it’s not quite fair to say that life after gold is not what she imagined it would be, because she never imagined gold in the first place.

“We didn’t even think I would be in the running for all-around [gold],” she says. “Everybody knew if you’re competing against Simone [Biles], you’re competing for second place.”

But in Tokyo, when Biles developed a case of gymnastics vertigo called the twisties that caused her to lose her sense of where she was in the air, she pulled out of the finals for the team and all-around competitions, then vault, uneven bars and floor. Lee stepped in and took her place during the team event, performing a floor routine she had not practiced in two days to preserve the U.S.’s silver medal.

Then she had to reimagine her goals for the all-around. She had trained to be “within a mistake of Simone,” as Graba put it at the time. But now Simone was a spectator. Lee nailed the vault and the uneven bars, and she survived the balance beam. She held a tenuous lead over Rebeca Andrade of Brazil as she ascended the platform for her floor routine, which she and Graba had adjusted mere hours earlier.

“This is why we’re here, to enjoy the moment,” he told her. “Have fun.”

Lee landed an almost perfect routine. Andrade would step out of bounds twice. Lee dissolved into tears as she was named Olympic champion.

Lee planned for a normal college life after Tokyo but instead, she became an overnight star. / Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

Three days later, she finished third on the uneven bars, her specialty, and two days after that, fifth on the beam, a pair of performances that infuriated her. But she was already caught in the whirlwind. She flew home in early August and matriculated at Auburn. In September, she attended the Met Gala and appeared on the Late Late Show with James Corden and Ellen. By October, she had designed a signature leotard, was competing on Dancing with the Stars and living in Los Angeles.

“I guess I didn’t realize that everybody watched the Olympics,” she says.

Sometimes, in the midst of all the chaos and commitments, she wondered if she really wanted any of this. Then she reminded herself that her earning potential would never be higher, that she owed it to her future self to capitalize on opportunities that would certainly disappear.

“It was so non-process oriented,” Graba says. “We had spent her lifetime, basically, teaching process and divorcing yourself from the result to the point where it was kind of weird to deal with the result.”

“We had spent her lifetime divorcing from the result to the point where it was kind of weird to deal with the result,” Graba says.

Lee never got the college experience she’d pictured. After learning that she might have to hire security to attend classes in person, she chose a virtual option instead. (“Online school was really boring,” she laments.) She tried to go to the cafeteria until she realized fellow students were taking videos of her eating. (“It’s so weird,” she says, cringing.) She says the attention escalated to stalking, but she does not want to elaborate. “It was scary,” she says. “I don’t know if I can talk about it.”

(Auburn’s athletic department said in a statement that it was “unaware of any private security advice” given to Lee, and that the school “take[s] our obligation to campus safety seriously for all Auburn students.”)

Lee felt that she couldn’t even confide in her teammates. “A lot of the girls weren’t the nicest to me,” she says. “I just really felt like an outcast, almost. They didn’t treat me that well. I just knew that I couldn’t trust them.” (She adds, “I have a couple of good, really genuine friends there,” but they are athletes in other sports.)

“Having someone of [Lee’s] stature and the attention that came with it was a learning experience for everyone,” says Auburn coach Jeff Graba. “We had a lot of success, and I believe that happened because the team worked together, grew and handled the entire situation with dignity, grace and comradery.”

Lee felt that everyone expected her to produce a perfect 10 in every college event. When she did, she had simply done what she was supposed to do. When she didn’t, she had failed. “Everybody just thinks since you’re the gold medalist, you never make mistakes,” says Jess Graba.  (Jess and Jeff Graba are twin brothers.)

Lee thought college gymnastics would be fun. Instead, she found she couldn’t win. In many ways, another Olympic push after winning gold is the same: all downside. At best, you can match what you already did. At worst—and at most likely—you fall short. Indeed, of the 11,182 Olympic gold medalists in history, 72.3% retired after their achievement. But that means 27.7% did not. Lee—and Crouser and Harrison and Kiefer—will now join the group who tried to go back for more.

This was all hard enough to endure when Lee had two functioning kidneys. But one morning in February 2023, midway through her sophomore season, she woke up with swollen ankles. She attributed it to a challenging training regimen, but the next day, the rest of her was swollen, too. She went to the gym and found she was slipping off the bar. Doctors suspected an allergic reaction, but the symptoms persisted; at times she was some 40 pounds heavier than her norm. “I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror,” she says now. “I didn’t even recognize myself.”

Her whole life, she had asked her body to do something, and it had complied. Now she couldn’t do anything. Eventually the doctors identified, at first one, then a second, kidney disease. (Lee declines to share her exact diagnosis, as the details of the condition fluctuate.) Generally, the kidneys filter waste and water from the blood, turning them into urine. When they are damaged, excess fluid can build up in the body. That March, about a month after her symptoms first appeared, Lee stopped training entirely, and in April, she decided to leave Auburn and move back home.

“I was just rotting in my bed,” she says. “I couldn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t leave the house.”

After her freshman season, she had begun to think about an Olympic comeback; now she worried she would run out of time. Her coaches worried she was missing the point.

“She thought, like every kid, Well, after I take the medicine, it will go back to normal, right?” Jess Graba says. “But it’s never going back to normal. She’s like, ‘I just don’t understand. When am I gonna start feeling better?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know. It may be never.’ ”

Despite her Tokyo all-around gold, Lee is focused on bars and beam this time around. / Tim Clayton/Corbis/Getty Images

He was concerned about her long-term quality of life, never mind her gymnastics career. So when doctors approved her in mid-April for some physical activity and she suggested a return to training, Jess Graba was thrilled. At that point, he and Alison Lim, his wife and co-coach, just wanted to get Lee into the gym and off social media. (“I’m, like, addicted to searching my name,” Lee says.)

“She just felt like, Everything else in my world is just completely off the rails right now,” Jess Graba says. “I can’t do anything about it. But here I can. I can go into the gym. I can just be myself. So she gets to come here and forget everything for three, four hours. And I fully expected it to be that. Even if that’s not what she wants, if that’s what she gets, it’s enough.

“Obviously she wants more.”

Lee began to see some improvement, even as she had to modify training daily based on what she could handle. On days her eyes were swollen nearly shut, that might just be bouncing on the trampoline. On good days, she could do her full uneven bars routine. As gymnasts leave their teenage years, they have to be more targeted in their training—their bodies are less flexible and need more recovery—even under the best of circumstances. These were not the best of circumstances. She began treating her joints and ligaments with much more care, and she cut back on sodium. She began asking about going to a national team camp. Before Lee and her coaches knew it, they were signing her up for the national championships, where she won bronze on the balance beam last August.

Recovery was not linear—she pulled herself out of the worlds selection camp last September—but on Jan. 4, 2024, she got a call from her doctors that made her believe she had a real chance to go to Paris. She declines to be specific about that conversation, but Jess Graba remembers that period fondly as well.

“That’s when she started saying, ‘I think they’re getting a handle on it,’ ” he says. “  ‘I’m feeling a lot better. The doctor just called me yesterday and told me that they think they can knock down some of the medications. So I’m feeling like maybe I want to try.’  ”

He immediately did the math. “The last time around, we’d been training for five years—five, six, seven years,” he says, of the period before Tokyo. This time, they had about seven months before Paris.

These days, Lee often discusses her journey back as inspirational, a chance to show people facing illness that they are stronger than they seem. She says she is just proud of herself for making it back into the gym. But none of that was the source of her urge to return to competition after winning gold. The source is that—as far as she’s concerned—she didn’t.

“I really wanted to redeem myself after last time, to get a freaking bars [gold] medal and a beam medal!” she says. “That was the original goal.”

Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

It takes a certain kind of delusion to convince yourself that winning the most prestigious award in gymnastics is somehow a disappointment. But that’s the same kind of delusion that got her to a gold medal to begin with. It’s the same delusion that keeps so many fellow Olympic champions convinced they have more to achieve.

“A lot of people say, ‘She already won the gold. What else does she have to prove?’ ” Jess Graba says. “But she didn’t win the gold to prove anything to you in the first place. She did it because she loves gymnastics.”

Lee wonders some days whether trying to run her title back was worth the mental and physical anguish. Then she’d walk into the gym and feel at home.

“I feel like people get it mixed up,” she says. “I don’t care about the money and the fame. All I wanted to do was go to the Olympics. I didn’t want anything that came after it. The only thing I wanted was the Olympics. So after that happened, when I was in the media at the time, it was really hard for me to deal with. I got so distracted, because I was like, ‘Whoa, SZA just followed me!’ It was just crazy stuff.”

This time, the focus was on the Olympics. Then everything that comes next will begin.               

[Golden Eagle 477]

Well, sorry to hear her bashing Auburn.  The storyline when she was here was that she loved it - competing in front of sold-out crowds, showing up at football and basketball games, etc.  Now she doesn't have anything positive to say about her time here.  Thanks, Suni!

[TigerTennis80 354]

FWIW, I don't hear Suni bashing Auburn as much as honestly saying how hard the aftermath of winning an Olympic gold medal often is. No one was prepared for what happened to her because no one--not the Grabas, not Auburn, not Suni herself--anticipated her winning that gold medal. And if Simone hadn't gotten the twisties, Suni wouldn't have won it. She'd still have been a celebrated student at Auburn with a silver medal, but the country would have been talking about Simone, not Suni. She likely wouldn't have gone to the Met gala or danced with the stars. But Simone did get the twisties & Suni won, so everyone had to adjust on the fly. It's not really a surprise that mistakes were made. I remember at the time wondering how the team would respond when they were in training & Suni was in LA dancing with the stars. They barely knew her at that point, & she was getting special treatment. Remember how young they were. I'm not surprised there was some resentment. I wish Auburn had handled getting her to class better than they apparently did, but it was unexpected & so many classes were online in the fall of 2021, so I'm guessing it was easier to go that route. I remember Cam had to have security to get to class, not because of threats (though he may have gotten them!) but because students wanted autographs & selfies constantly. I'll tell you, as someone who teaches online classes, almost no one likes them. They're convenient, & that's about all they offer. Online students often feel very isolated. Think of all the things you loved about being at Auburn--for me it was ball games (of course), seeing folks on the Concourse & in the cafeteria, going to free movies (anyone else remember those?) & other campus events, sharing late night munchies with dorm mates, even just walking across campus & knowing everyone I passed mostly understood my life (classes, studying, love life, fights with roommates, etc.). And then think that Suni had almost none of those kinds of things (whatever the 2021-23 version of those things were). So, I read her as lamenting how hard it all was rather than bashing Auburn. It was hard before she got sick. And then she got sick. Now she's back, so I'll be pulling for her like crazy tonight & Sunday. I hope she makes the Olympic team, & this time I hope she has fun doing it. If Simone is right, Suni won't win the all-around gold this time, & I'm pulling like crazy for that to happen also. I hope they both are great & have fun & then are able to go on with their lives in some kind of sane, joyful way. 

[AUBwins 10,297]

I think they must have embellished a little on the girls being mean to her and she loves Auburn more than that article implied.  The above tweet just now after her floor routine in trials.  And Suni gave Auburn the ❤️ when they encouraged her.  Anyways Suni finished night 1 3rd in all around behind Simone and Jordan.  Jade was right behind Suni.  Pretty much in rotation order from the last Olympic team.