Suni Lee bursts to bronze in Olympic women’s gymnastics all-around

Suni Lee stepped onto the floor mat for the final rotation of the Olympic women’s gymnastics all-around final in Paris on Thursday. She needed what commentator and former Olympic gymnast Laurie Hernandez called “the routine of her life” to leap up the standings and clinch a bronze medal.

Her 13.533 on floor had been enough to help the United States earn team gold on Tuesday. Lee, the defending all-around champion from St. Paul, needed a 13.535 to break ahead of Italy’s Alice D’Amato and Algeria’s Kaylia Nemour in Thursday’s three-way race for bronze.

“I don’t even know how to do math in my head,” Lee, 21, said at a news conference afterward.

“Me either,” said U.S. teammate Simone Biles, now the most decorated Olympic gymnast in American history. The pair had been “freaking out,” said Lee, trying to calculate scores mid-competition.

Math matters less when a performance defies slim margins. Lee beamed after nailing her first tumbling pass across the mat. Her 13.666 on floor earned the bronze and made her the first woman since 1980 to follow up an all-around gold medal with another medal at the following Olympics. The last to do so was Nadia Comeneci.

Biles took her sixth gold medal and became the sixth consecutive American to win the women’s all-around. Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade earned her second consecutive silver.

A year ago, Lee wasn’t thinking about making it back to the podium in Paris after winning all-around gold in Tokyo at age 18. She was “rotting in [her] bed,” she said, battling two kidney diseases and the psychological pressures of post-gold celebrity.

In late June, Lee qualified for the U.S. team in front of a hometown Twin Cities crowd at the team trials at Target Center. There, after making her second Olympic team, she admitted, “This one feels so different.”

“We didn’t even think I’d be here,” she said after the trials. “Everything has been hitting me like a freaking roller coaster. I haven’t stopped crying since, and I’m so happy because there were many times I thought about quitting and walking away from this sport because I didn’t think I’d ever get to this point.”

On Thursday in Paris, as the top six gymnasts headed into the final rotation on floor, D’Amato was in third, just 0.034 points ahead of a tied Lee and Nemour.

Lee had scored 13.933 on vault, fifth-best in the top group. Her 14.866 on uneven bars — the event in which she won bronze at the Tokyo Games — made up some of the distance, second-best behind Nemour. With a few small wobbles, Lee’s 14.000 on beam was below the 14.600 that she scored in the team final, but still helped her catch up to Nemour, whose 13.233 was the lowest score of the top group.

That put Lee in position for her medal-sealing floor routine.

“I really didn’t think I would even get on the podium, so it’s just crazy that I was here. I did everything I could,” said Lee, who now has five career Olympic medals. “I went out there, and I just told myself not to put any pressure on myself because I didn’t want to think about the past Olympics or even trying to prove to anybody anything.

“I wanted to just prove to myself that I could do it, because I didn’t think that I could.”

Andrade, 25, led the field after the second rotation, when Biles made a mistake on the uneven bars, but otherwise Biles, 27, was in control throughout the competition. Biles, the 2016 all-around champion, became the first gymnast to win non-consecutive all-around gold medals and the first to win two gold medals in the event since the 1960s.

Biles had her own comeback journey after withdrawing from the Tokyo all-around and team competitions with the twisties — a mental phenomenon when a gymnast feels like she has no control over her body in the air. She then took two years off from competition.

Thursday’s final was the first time two former all-around gold medalists have competed against one another in the Olympics. And with that, Biles and Lee became the first two American women to medal twice in the all-around.

“Having Simone here today definitely helped me a lot because we were both freaking out, and so it was nice to know that I was not out there freaking out by myself,” Lee said.

She added they got to “do it the right way this time.”

Lee will compete in the balance beam final on Sunday and bars final on Monday. Ahead of the Olympics, she said her goals included gold on beam and a medal on bars in Paris.

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