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.”
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