St. Paul gymnast Suni Lee wins bronze medal in uneven bars at Paris Olympics

Once again, St. Paul gymnast Suni Lee knew the score she needed to win an Olympic medal.

In Thursday’s women’s all-around final, as one of the last competitors on the floor exercise, Lee needed a 13.535 to clinch the bronze medal. She got a 13.666.

On Sunday in the uneven bar final, Lee was the last gymnast to perform. She needed at least a 14.767 to pass defending champion Nina Derwael of Belgium to claim the bronze. She hit a 14.800 to finish third in the event for the second straight Olympics.

Lee, 21, has now won six career Olympics medals, including three in Paris.

Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour, the favorite, won the gold medal with a score of 15.700. That was two-tenths of a point higher than silver medalist Qiu Qiyuan of China.

“I was really aiming for third place, because I really wanted Kaylia to win because she’s so incredible,” Lee told reporters Sunday. “It’s so cool to see everybody go up there and do the routines they were meant to do.”

Qiu performed right before Nemour and nailed every element, garnering her highest score on the apparatus by far in Paris. Then Nemour, who is from France but is representing her father’s country, had her home crowd cheering for each move. And she too got her best score of the Olympics, tied for the highest score of the meet in any event.

“Watching her on bars is like watching a feather,” Lee said of Nemour. “She literally looks like a feather up there. She’s flying, she’s so light. It looks so good, and it’s so fast and so smooth.”

As she waited her turn, Lee was cheering everyone else’s routine. She acknowledged watching those before her added to the pressure, but she wasn’t going to miss them “because they’re so good.”

Lee’s coach, Jess Graba of Midwest Gymnastics in Little Canada, called it the “best bar final I’ve seen in I don’t know how long.”

It was certainly different from the bars final at the Tokyo Olympics, where many gymnasts, including Lee, struggled, Graba said, because rules at the time didn’t allow for a warm-up period on the apparatus.

Three years ago, Lee was among the favorites and had been hoping for a gold. But her routine got off to a bad start, an early mistake forcing her to fight through the rest of it.

Bars was her thing, Lee said in 2021, “so to mess it up like this, I’m kind of sad about it.”

In Paris, Lee was not the favorite. She was just happy to be there, after struggling through two kidney ailments that derailed her training and her diet and had her worried her gymnastics career was over.

“Last time I got a bronze medal, but I didn’t feel like I deserved it because of the routine that I did,” Lee told reporters Sunday. “And I told myself this time that even if I don’t make the podium or medal, I am going to be happy with whatever I get if I do the routine that I was supposed to do. That’s why I feel like I am so much more happy.”

Of the gymnasts who reached the final, Lee had the fifth highest start value based on difficulty, 6.4. She had the third highest score in qualifying, behind Nemour and Qiu, both 17 and first-time Olympians, who had routines with 7.2 difficulty scores.

By the time Lee’s turn came, gold and silver seemed out of reach.

“I really wanted to just put a good, clean routine together. I didn’t want to risk it,” Lee said. “I saw my scores and I saw that if I just did the routine that I did the past couple of days, then I could have medaled.”

Leading up to U.S. Olympic trials, Lee and Graba had contemplated including a skill in her bars routine that, if she could hit it in international competition, would be named after her and raise her difficulty score. But she didn’t master it in time, and it was more important to secure a medal, Lee said, than to have a skill named after her.

Her legacy seems secure regardless. With six Olympic medals, she is one behind Shannon Miller for the second most by an American gymnast. Lee has a chance to tie Miller on Monday in the balance beam final (5:38 a.m. Central time).

Lee has said her goals for Paris were to win team gold, to return to the all-around final, to finish in the top 3 again in bars, and to win gold in the balance beam.

Even with three of those goals accomplished, Lee said she is trying to give herself some grace.

“I just have to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t even supposed to be here,” she said. “That’s the thing that’s in the back of my head. Because I’m like, you know what? A couple months ago we didn’t even think this was a possibility. So I’m happy with anything that I can get.”

Star Tribune staff writer Rachel Blount and the Associated Press contributed reporting.

The Star Tribune did not send the writer of this article to the event. This was written using a broadcast, interviews and other material.