‘Tough as nails’: Lee fights nerves, pain to capture gold
Sunisa Lee wanted to quit during quarantine.
It all had become too much. The lingering pain from a broken foot. The deaths of two family members from COVID-19. Her father’s slow recovery from an accident that left him paralyzed.
The urge eventually passed. It always does. Still, less than two months ago the 18-year-old gymnast hobbled around the podium at the U.S. championships, getting by more on grit than anything else.
Tokyo seemed far away.
The top of the Olympic podium, even further.
Then suddenly, there she was on Thursday night as a tinny version of The StarSpangled Banner echoed across Ariake Gymnastics Centre. Gold medal around her neck. A watch party back home among the
Hmong-American community in her native Minnesota raging. A victory she never envisioned not yet sinking in.
“It’s crazy,” Lee said after winning the Olympic allaround title following a tight duel with Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade. “It doesn’t seem like real life.”
After Simone Biles opted out, Sunisa Lee stepped up to win the women’s all-around title for the U.S. team.
Even though the pain in Lee’s foot eased, she arrived in Japan figuring her best shot was at a silver medal. Sure, she’d beaten good friend and reigning champion Simone Biles at the U.S. Olympic Trials last month, but that was an anomaly, right?
Then Biles opted out of the all-around competition to focus on her mental health following an eight-year run atop the sport.
Everything was on the table. Gold included. Lee took it with a brilliant set on uneven bars, a nervy performance on beam and a floor exercise that made up for in execution what it lacked in aggression.
Her total of 57.433 points was just enough to top Andrade, who earned the first gymnastics allaround medal by a Latin American athlete but missed out on gold when she stepped out of bounds twice during her floor routine.
When Andrade’s score appeared, Lee hugged her coach, Jess Graba, in tears.
“She’s tough as nails,” Graba said. “People don’t see that. They don’t know how hurt she is. They don’t know how stressed out she is. They don’t
know how nervous she is.”
Russian gymnast Angelina Melnikova added bronze to the gold she won in the team final. American Jade Carey, who joined the competition after Biles pulled out, finished eighth.
Biles’ decision to sit out led to the jarring sight of the gymnast considered the greatest of all time cheering on Lee and the rest of the 24-woman field from the stands with the gold in play for everyone else.
Still, Lee did her best to not think about the stakes. She FaceTimed with her father John – who was
paralyzed from the chest down during a freak accident in Minnesota just days before the 2019 national championships – before the meet, just like always. He told her to relax. So she did. Or at least, she tried.
Lee admitted she was getting “in her head” a little bit while prepping for her bar routine, the one that’s currently the hardest in the world. She didn’t exactly look nervous. The 15.300 the judges rewarded her for a series of intricate connections and releases tied Andrade’s near-perfect Cheng vault for the highest score of the night.
Yet it wasn’t Lee’s brilliance that made the difference, but her guts. She nearly came off the balance beam while executing a wolf turn – basically a seated spin – needed to suction cup her toes to the 4-inch slab of wood to stay on. Her score of 13.833 moved her in front of Andrade heading into the floor exercise.
Lee’s victory marked the fifth straight by a U.S. woman.
“I want people to know that you can reach your dreams and you can just do what you want to do,” she said. “Because you never know what’s going to happen in the end.”