Olympics 2024 | Stalkers, disease and doubt: A gymnast’s hard road back to the Paris Games

The title of gold medalist came with a level of celebrity that Sunisa Lee, who was a quiet 18-year-old from a conservative Hmong community in Minnesota, was not prepared for — and didn’t want.

Paris: Sunisa Lee, the all-around gold medalist in women’s gymnastics at the Tokyo Olympics, woke up one morning last year and was startled by her reflection in the mirror.

Her face looked as if it had been inflated with an air pump. Her leg joints were so swollen that she could hardly bend her knees or ankles. A scale revealed she had gained more than 10 pounds.

Her mind raced: Had she been eating too much? Was it the pollen in the air? Maybe she was allergic to her roommate’s new dog?

“I was like, who is this person looking back at me?” Lee, who is competing for the United States at the Paris Games, said in an interview. “It was so scary. I didn’t know it then, but the old Suni was gone. And she would never be back.”

Lee had been a surprise winner in Tokyo: Simone Biles — the overwhelming favorite for that gold medal — had withdrawn from the Games with a mental block that made her feel unsafe performing her flips and twists in the air.

The title of gold medalist came with a level of celebrity that Lee, who was a quiet 18-year-old from a conservative Hmong community in Minnesota, was not prepared for — and didn’t want.

She has had stalkers, including one who her coaches say tried to track her down in at least three states. At Auburn University, where she was on the gymnastics team for two years, the attention she received was so smothering that she resorted to taking online classes from her bedroom so she could avoid the campus.

Instead of reveling in her celebrity, Lee, now 21, said she was depressed and lonely, and often cried herself to sleep.

She said she missed her old, normal life and felt that she hadn’t deserved to win the Olympic gold medal, as online critics constantly told her.

“In my head, I already don’t think that I should have won, so when you see it from other people and that many people are saying the same thing over and over and that I just suck and all this stuff, it’s like very hard mentally,” she said.

But the reason her body was swollen that morning last year was the most frightening turn of all. Doctors initially told her that she’d never do gymnastics again.

“For so many different reasons since Tokyo, I had to really grow up, and fast,” she said.

Leaving home

After the Tokyo Games, Lee left her hometown, St. Paul, Minnesota, against her parents’ wishes and headed to college at Auburn and a host of other opportunities, including TV shows on both coasts and red carpet events such as the Met Gala.

Her parents, Yeev Thoj and John Lee — Hmong immigrants who escaped Laos after the Vietnam War — had other plans for her after the Olympics.

John Lee said in an interview that he wanted Suni to “do some work, stay in Minnesota and go to school.” He said he is used to Hmong girls staying with their parents until they are married, not setting out on far-off adventures.

“In the Hmong community, we’d rather have them stay home with us so we can kind of monitor them,” said Thoj, who has three children still living at home. “But in this generation, it’s different than ours.”

Although Suni Lee was a teenager with little experience outside of the gym, she still felt a strong pull to forge a life of her own, saying to herself, “I just have to do this for myself this time.”

She had barely settled in at Auburn before heading off to Los Angeles for a few months to compete on “Dancing With the Stars,” where she finished fifth. It was the first time she had lived on her own, and the refrigerator in her two-bedroom apartment reflected that, said her longtime coach, Jess Graba.

Inside were Uber Eats deliveries with forks still in the containers and days-old unopened packages that had sat on Lee’s doorstep for hours because she had unexpectedly been called to dance practice.

Graba would fly to Los Angeles from St. Paul every few weeks to check on Lee, making sure she kept up with her online classes at Auburn. He and his wife and fellow coach, Alison Lim, who goes by Ali, have known Lee since she was 6 and consider her a family member. When Jess Graba saw the uncovered food in Lee’s fridge, he told her, “Um, botulism much? Suni, you can’t eat like this.”

And when she said the clothes dryer wasn’t working, he investigated and found inch-thick lint in the trap. His twin brother, Jeff, the head gymnastics coach at Auburn, would visit too, and the two of them would deep clean the apartment.

“Nothing was conducive for a young, young kid to be in Hollywood by herself and be happy and thrive there,” Graba said.

Lee felt that she was narrowly hanging on as this new and abnormal life came at her. During those months, she was out with a group of Asian friends when people in a passing car shouted racial slurs and sprayed pepper spray. Lee was hit in the arm.

And at times she was so nervous before performing a dance that she would call Graba just beforehand to say she could not possibly go onstage because she had to vomit.

“Just stop the dance and throw up in a trash can,” Graba would tell her on speakerphone as she got her makeup done. “Now <em>that</em> would be some good television.”

He always found a way to make her laugh.

“If I didn’t have Jess and Ali in my life, I would die,” Lee said.

Back to school

When she returned to Auburn, Lee became the first female all-around Olympic champion to compete in college gymnastics. She brought unusual fanfare to the program.

Fans packed the arenas — the phenomenon became known as “the Suni effect” — to see her score her perfect 10s, finish second in the all-around at the NCAA championship and help the Tigers win meets and rise in the rankings.

People would mob the team as it got on and off its bus, sometimes delaying departure for hours, Jeff Graba said. He called it “the Auburn gymnastics circus.”

“Everything was coming at her at 100 miles an hour, and I think she handled it better than most 18-year-olds handle normal issues,” he said. “But hers were not normal issues.”

In her dorm room, Lee found notes admirers had slipped under her door and heard knocks at all hours from fellow students asking her for her photo. In cafeterias, she saw students taking photos and videos of her while she ate. People would stare as she crossed campus and call out her name.

Most troubling, a Hmong man in his 40s or 50s had followed her from Minnesota, her coaches said. He had showed up at Midwest Gymnastics in Little Canada, Minnesota, Jess Graba’s gym, looking for Lee, too.

“That man was causing real problems,” Graba said.

The university soon hired a security guard to escort Lee in public, Jeff Graba said — the same security guard who watched over quarterback Cam Newton when he was at Auburn.

All Lee wanted to do was stay in her room, where she felt safe, she said.

“I couldn’t trust anybody because it was always like people wanted things from me, like, ‘Hey, can you do this for me or can you do that for me?’” she said. “I just started to feel like I couldn’t talk to anybody about anything.”

She added, “I had to learn to be alone.”

A health setback

In November 2022, Lee announced that she was leaving Auburn after the spring season to train for the Paris Olympics.

Her last meet was in Georgia, where security had to sweep the hotel, looking for two men who were stalking her, Jeff Graba said. And in the days after that meet, her ankles became swollen. They at first thought it was from landing short on one of her tumbling passes. But days later, she woke up swollen all over.

Doctors thought it could be an allergic reaction, but after numerous tests and countless questions, the culprit was clear: Lee’s kidneys weren’t working properly. She said she told doctors that she had barely urinated for about two weeks.

It turned out that kidney problems ran in their family, something Lee hadn’t known. Thoj said her brother died of kidney failure at 45, and her mother was “a little bit over 60” when she died of the same thing.

Lee quit training for Paris and canceled her promotional work, which made her anxious because, she said, “I need to provide for myself and my siblings.” She had opened college savings accounts for those siblings and had been frugal with what was left.

She moved home to Minnesota, living in her own apartment and getting an Australian Shepherd puppy named Bean. Many days and nights, she languished in bed, cuddling with him and wetting his fur with her tears.

A biopsy finally revealed that she was dealing with two kidney diseases, the names of which she doesn’t want to reveal. Doctors at the Mayo Clinic, about 80 miles from her, tried different drug combinations to control her symptoms. Changes in that regimen often came with side effects, including weight gain and exhaustion.

“It wasn’t something like I can just take a pill and be better; I was going to have to deal with this my whole life,” she said, explaining that she has to take medicine every day.

Lee was on bed rest for weeks, took off five months and gained 45 pounds on her 5-foot frame before returning to the gym.

She had to buy large or extra-large clothing, and some days her hands were so swollen that she couldn’t fit them into the grips she used for uneven bars. Sometimes, she would fly off the bars because her hands were so puffy and weak. Her body was retaining so much water that her center of gravity also was off, disrupting her balance, flips and twists.

The steroid Lee was taking weakened her ligaments and tendons, and Graba had to make sure she wasn’t doing too much. The hardest part, he said, was that her brain was sure she could still perform her usual high-level gymnastics, but her body wasn’t ready.

Lee came back for two important national meets in 2023, and won medals at both, but not without challenges. She was on a strict low-sodium diet, so Graba had to buy an air fryer in each city to cook her chicken just right. Lee declined an invitation to the selection camp for the world championships. She needed more time.

“I was just so afraid because I already announced that I was coming back for the Olympics, and I was like, well, I can’t pull out now,” Lee said. “But then I had to switch my thinking. Why am I doing it for everyone else? If I’m doing that, then I’m doing it for the wrong reasons.”

A crucial phone call

On Jan. 4, 2024 — she said she will never forget the date — Lee’s doctor called to say that her medications were working well and she wouldn’t have to go in for infusions as often. Those treatments had exhausted her and often set her back at least a week, her coaches said. Now she could focus on training for the Paris Olympics, less than seven months away.

When she returned full-time to Midwest Gymnastics, she found a sanctuary. It didn’t just have elite gymnasts training for meets; it was filled with little boys and girls just learning how to do cartwheels. They knew who she was but didn’t treat her like a superstar. Nobody asked her for her autograph or bugged her for a photo there.

“I didn’t have to be the perfect Suni that everyone was staring at; I could just go there and be plain old Suni again,” she said. “And whoa, was it a relief.”

Her health problems made it difficult to train the way she had in the past, and Lee was frustrated and emotionally spent. Gone were the days of doing countless repetitions to get her moves and routines just right. She had to learn a more deliberate way of training, and trust that it could be just as effective.

“Whenever I’m talking to my coaches, I’m always like, I get really sad because I’m never going to be the same, like the same Suni, not the same athlete,” she said. “And they’re like, good.”

She explained that Graba and Lim tell her that she is a tougher, more resilient athlete now because of what she has endured.

Sometimes, she has needed to be convinced of that. During the vault competition at last month’s US nationals, Lee landed on her rear end and left the floor to have what she later called “a breakdown.”

“In my head, I was already like, OK, I’m done, this is it,” she said, adding that she was sure that bad performance would carry over to her other events and her elite career would end right there.

But Biles showed up to give her a pep talk, and it worked.

“She was, like, ‘I’m not OK,’” Biles said after the meet. She said she told Lee that she should continue for herself, and for the goals Lee had set. She told her that she can do hard things.

“I just know that she needed some encouragement and somebody to trust her gymnastics for her and to believe in her,” Biles said.

Lee, whose signature event is the uneven bars, asked Biles to stand next to the bars during her routine, and Biles did, calling out encouragement. That reassurance helped Lee get through the rest of the meet — and beyond it, she said.

Lee’s kidney diseases are now in remission. At the US Olympic trials last month, less than six months after she returned to her training, she finished fourth in the all-around to secure her spot on her second Olympic team. Her parents watched her from high up in a suite.

Speaking to the crowd through a microphone with her Olympic teammates at her side, she said, “A year ago, I didn’t even think this was possible,” struggling to get out that last word before she doubled over in tears.