Suni Lee stepped onto the Olympic floor at Bercy Arena. She placed her right knee on a 90-degree angle and extended her left leg to a 45-degree angle from her waist to the floor while she reached her arms above her head.
When Lindsey Stirling’s “Eye of The Untold Her” began, Lee’s battle for bronze ensued.
The defending all-around gold medalist needed a score of 13.535 on the floor routine in order to move ahead of Italian gymnast Alice D’Amato and secure a spot on the podium. Lee was tied for fourth place with Algerian gymnast Kaylia Nemour entering the final rotation.
“We were literally like calculating,” Lee said before she and teammate Simone Biles laughed at themselves. “I was like I don’t even know how to do math in my head, she was like, ‘Me neither.’”
After Lee’s first pass on the floor, she revealed a radiant smile that resolved any doubts of her spot on the podium. The mathematical equation for which gymnast would be number three on the podium equaled Lee.
“I just wanted to prove to myself that I could do it because I didn’t think that I could,” Lee said. “This is definitely a special one.”
Two days before Thursday’s all-around final, D’Amato helped lead her team to its first Olympic medal in 96 years. D’Amato stepped out of bounds on her first tumbling pass, but the rest of her routine was near-flawless despite the initial mistake costing her the bronze medal.
When Nemour took the floor, she landed with her chest close to the ground on her first pass through and then stepped out of bounds on her second. She ended her routine losing her balance on her final pass which caused her to stumble a few steps forward.
The combination of mistakes ended her path to the podium.
After Lee won the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, she earned celebrity status before she competed in any NCAA competition. Last year, she was diagnosed with two kidney diseases that put a halt to her training.
Lee’s coach at Midwest Gymnastics, Jess Graba, was by her side in the training. When Lee faced the uncertainty of her gymnastics career, Graba said he would be OK with any decision she made.
“I was going to let her quit, not for the wrong reasons though,” Graba said. “If that’s what she needed and that’s what made her healthy then I would have been fine with it.”
Lee bursted, on the mat and into tears, at the Olympic trials when she secured her ticket to Paris at the Target Center. The St. Paul gymnast joined her teammate Biles on the competition floor waving an American flag in Paris after Biles claimed her ninth Olympic medal.
Biles became the most decorated Olympic gymnast on Tuesday when Team USA earned a gold medal in the Olympic team final. Biles had a lead of 0.166 over Brazilian gymnast Rebeca Andrade heading into the final rotation.
Biles’s opening pass included a triple double that helped to earn her the gold medal.
“I don’t want to compete with Rebeca no more,” Biles said. “I was stressing.”
Lee promptly responded that she had never seen Biles that stressed in her life.
The American womens’ quest for Olympic hardware is not over. Lee competes on Sunday in the beam event final and again on Monday in the uneven bars final. After the Olympic trials, Lee said she wanted the gold medal on beam and medal on bars.
Biles will compete against Andrade again in her remaining events — the vault final on Saturday and twice more on the beam and floor finals on Monday.