How Suni Lee’s health journey changed her gymnastics mindset: ‘This is what I want’

MINNEAPOLIS — This week’s U.S. gymnastics trials have all the makings of one of those schmaltzy pieces that are a staple of NBC’s Olympic coverage:

Reigning Olympic champion gets to make a victory lap in her hometown, capped by a trip to a second Summer Games.

If only it were that simple for Suni Lee.

Lee is in good shape to make the five-person U.S. team for the Paris Olympics. She was fourth at the national championships in early June and has upgraded her routines on uneven bars and floor since then. But a health crisis 15 months ago has upended her life, putting her gymnastics career in doubt and forcing the 21-year-old to confront realities and self-doubts that would challenge people twice her age.

Add to all that the anxiety of competing in front of the hometown crowd, wanting to put on a good show for all the people who have stopped her these last few months to tell her how proud of her they are and how they can't wait for her to compete.

Get Olympics updates in your texts! Join USA TODAY Sports' WhatsApp Channel

“Whenever I'm talking to my coaches, I get really sad because I'm never going to be the same. I'm not the same Suni, I’m not the same athlete,” Lee said earlier this year. “And they're like, 'Good. You don't want to be. You're doing everything and more right now, and you should be proud of the way that you've been able to come back from everything because you never thought that you would be in this position.’ And I was like, 'You're so right!’”

“But it's just hard mentally because I was in a really good spot last Olympics getting ready,” she said. “So now it's just kind of hard switching that mental aspect of it.”

Subscribe to USA TODAY's Olympics newsletter: Your guide to the 2024 Paris Olympics

Lee went to Auburn right after winning gold in Tokyo, wanting to have the college experience and to compete at the NCAA level. But she also wanted to make a run at Paris and announced in November 2022 that she’d leave Auburn at the end of her sophomore season.

Before that season could even end, however, Lee developed a kidney disease that caused her to retain so much fluid there were days she couldn’t even put on her grips. She returned to Minneapolis and began working with doctors at the Mayo Clinic, who discovered she was suffering from a second kidney ailment.

Thus began a nearly yearlong nightmare of tweaking medications and Lee feeling as if she had no control over her body. At one point, she said, she’d gained 40 pounds. There were days she could train and days she could only do certain things.

And then there were days she couldn’t even get out of bed.

“You just have to grow up really fast,” Jess Graba, who has coached Lee for almost her entire career, said Wednesday. “She probably is still trying to process that information because this is lifelong. But also it's kind of made us reevaluate what we would normally do and how we would normally do it."

Lee said a phone call she got Jan. 4, the details she wants to keep private, was a turning point for her.

“I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I’m going back into the gym tomorrow and I'm going to be better than I ever was.’ That was the day I was like, 'Yep, this is what I want. And I'm gonna put my mind into it,’” she said.

Lee said she initially put pressure on herself to immediately be in Olympic shape and would get frustrated that she wasn’t. But Graba told her to relax. Don’t think about Paris, he’d tell her, focus instead on what you want to accomplish in the gym for this day or this week.

By the end of February, Lee had returned to competition. It was an inauspicious start — she did only uneven bars and balance beam at Winter Cup and fell off both — but it let her know she could still do this.

She and Graba have been deliberate in their progression since then, slowly adding skills and events with an eye on being at full strength, or close to it, by trials.

“I want Suni to just compete at her personal best,” said Alicia Sacramone Quinn, who is the strategic lead for the women’s high-performance team and sits on the Olympic team selection committee.

“She has overcome a lot of adversity in her personal life and her health,” Sacramone Quinn added. “If she can just have two great days of competition and be happy and healthy, that’s what I want to see from her.”

Lee admits she suffered from “impostor syndrome” after Tokyo — which wasn’t helped by all the awful people on the Internet who told her she’d won by default.

Simone Biles, the Rio Olympic champion who’d won the previous two world titles, had to withdraw with a case of “the twisties,” which caused her to lose track of where she was in the air and put her health and safety at risk. Had Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade stayed in bounds on floor exercise in Tokyo, she’d have finished ahead of Lee.

“When you see it from other people and that many people are saying the same thing over, that I just suck and all this stuff, it’s very hard mentally,” Lee acknowledged.

But if Lee’s health issues have taught her anything, it’s that medals can’t be the motivation. Nor wanting to answer her critics. This is about her and knowing, even after everything, she can do this.

“That's why she came back to get centered after all the health scare: You do this for personal reasons,” Graba said. “And I really could care less about what she accomplishes, other than I want her to accomplish what she wants to accomplish. I want her to do her best.”

It's not a made-for-TV fairytale. As Lee has learned, however, such things don't exist. Real life is harder. No matter what happens, this weekend or in the next month, she knows she had the courage to see her dream through. Not for anyone else.

For herself.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Sunisa Lee's health journey changed her gymnastics mindset. Here's how