PARIS (AP) — There is a freedom that Sunisa Lee feels when she’s on the uneven bars that’s hard for her to describe.
Sure, there’s anxiety before every routine. Funny how it melts away the second that familiar combination of wood and fiberglass hits her grips.
At that point, the American gymnastics star just sort of goes blank. Her innate air awareness — a talent that longtime coach Jess Graba believes Lee simply may have been born with — and the countless hours she’s logged in an event that’s become her signature combine allow her to zen out.
“It’s just fun to me,” she said. “(It’s like) flying around out there.”
For the better part of a year, however, Lee was largely grounded. The struggle to get a pair of kidney diseases under control led her weight to fluctuate wildly. At one point, the 2020 Olympic champion believes she put on 45 pounds. In December, she was bedridden.
Three years ago, she fumed after earning a bronze on bars, vowing to reach the top of the podium in Paris.
She didn’t. And in a way, she couldn’t care less. The bronze she won — much to her own surprise — in an electric bars final on Sunday was in some ways as sweet as any individual honor she’s achieved in a career that now has six Olympic medals and counting.
“I just have to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t even supposed to be here,” Lee said. “So that’s the thing that’s in the back of my head because I’m like, ‘You know what? Like a couple months ago, we didn’t even think this was a possibility.’”
The 21-year-old who wasn’t sure she’d ever get back to this stage can tie Shannon Miller for the second-most Olympic medals by a American gymnast behind good friend Simone Biles if she finishes in the top three in the balance beam final on Monday.
No, she didn’t win gold. Yet she hit her routine — something Lee doesn’t believe she did well enough in Tokyo — and had no complaints about the results while finishing behind Kaylia Nemour of Algeria and Qiu Qiyuan of China.
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Lee stood and cheered Nemour during her gold medal-winning set, one that is a dazzling mix of artistry and technical precision. Maybe it’s because Lee has a greater appreciation than most on what it takes to make something so demanding look so incredibly easy.
It’s an ability that Lee has had from the start. And even as she tried to navigate her health problems, she and Graba put together a plan that included Lee introducing a new skill that could have boosted her difficulty high enough to put her in the mix for gold.
One problem: She couldn’t quite get the hang of it in competition. She fell while attempting it during the American Cup in February. USA Gymnastics then opted not to give her an international assignment that would have let her try it in front of foreign judges to get a feel for how it might be scored.
So rather than press forward, Lee and Graba improvised, coming to the conclusion that it might be safer to put together a slightly less risky set that would take gold out of the equation but leave her in better position to make the five-woman U.S. team.
“She came over right over and said, ‘I think I’ve got to move on,’” Graba said. “And I’m like, ‘I was going to talk to you about that today.’ Yeah. So we both knew it.”
The shift set the stage for an Olympics that finds Lee every bit the equal — if not better — of who she was in Tokyo. She and Biles helped power the U.S. to gold in the team final, and Lee followed it up two days later by finishing third behind Biles and Rebeca Andrade of Brazil in the all-around, making her the first reigning Olympic champion to medal in the next Games since Romanian icon Nadia Comaneci in 1980.
Tokyo ended with glory, sure. It just wasn’t necessarily fun. The restrictions put in place because of the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with Biles’ decision to pull out of multiple finals to focus on her mental health, made for a somewhat strange vibe.
Things have changed considerably in Paris. She has become perhaps the most famous active gymnast in the world not named Biles. There were chants of “USA! USA!” inside the arena as she accepted her bronze, with a woman not far off the floor shouting “Minnesota Mafia!” to the young woman from St. Paul.
The 2020 Games, this is not. In the best way possible.
“I feel like I’m doing so much better this time around,” Lee said. “And even having the girls, like we really could not be here without each other and just having the support and being able to lean on each other has been incredible.”
Lee made it a point after U.S. Olympic trials to emphasize that a gold on beam — an event where her singular elegance shines through — would be the ultimate prize in France.
It’s still on the table. Not bad for someone whose winding path to Paris included the kind of roadblocks she never imagined when she left Japan a champion.
Yet there she was on Sunday in an Olympic final, soaring and swooping from one bar to the other, her mind on autopilot, her red leotard a beacon of sorts to those thinking of quitting when all seems lost, as she nearly did so many times along the way.
“You never know what can happen,” she said. “So just keep reaching for your dreams.”
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