American women gymnasts have won gold medals in the all-around competition at the past four Olympic Games: Carly Patterson in 2004, Nastia Liukin in 2008, Gabby Douglas in 2012, and Simone Biles in 2016. The closest that any other country has come to such a streak is the Soviet Union, which, in 1960, earned its third consecutive all-around gold. But Biles’s announcement, on Wednesday, that she would sit out the all-around, as she had the team finals the day before, seemed likely to put an end to Team U.S.A.’s string of victories. Without Biles, the top qualifier going into the all-around was Rebeca Andrade, representing Brazil as an individual competitor. (The country did not qualify to send an entire team.) Last weekend, during qualifications, Andrade had come unusually close to beating Biles, trailing her by only several tenths of a point. Other contenders for the podium included two Russians—Angelina Melnikova and Vladislava Urazova, who’d qualified in fourth and fifth place—and Sunisa Lee, Biles’s eighteen-year-old teammate, who’d qualified in third.
For the past decade, Biles’s dominance has had the strange effect of dampening the suspense of competition: her teammates were vying for second place, never first. (“If you get silver, you’re the best,” Biles’s teammate Laurie Hernandez said at the 2016 Games, “because Simone doesn’t count!”) On Thursday, Biles was in the stands, cheering on both Lee and Jade Carey, the twenty-one-year-old American who took her place in the all-around. Biles’s absence from the mat restored a sense of balance: the meet, once seen as a foregone conclusion, was now a free-for-all. After the team finals, during which Lee anchored the uneven bars lineup and stepped in to fill Biles’s spot on the floor, she described experiencing “the most pressure I’ve ever felt in my life.” But Biles’s subsequent exit from the all-around introduced a new and unexpected pressure: Lee, previously a contender for silver, now had the potential to win gold.
On Thursday, the results came down to the fourth rotation, on the floor, where the scores of the top four contenders spanned just five-tenths of a point. During the first three rotations, Lee had risen steadily in the rankings, from fourth place to second and then from second to first. But floor is not her strongest event: had the top four gymnasts performed exactly as they had in qualifying rounds, gold, silver, and bronze would have gone to Andrade, Melnikova, and Urazova, respectively, with Lee in fourth, just shy of the podium. Lee performed a smooth floor routine. She dropped one tumbling pass—completing three rather than four, to shore up her execution score—and ended up posting her highest floor mark yet in Tokyo. She moved into silver place, behind Andrade, who was one of the last to perform. Andrade needed a 13.802 to clinch the gold, but on her first tumbling pass she went out of bounds. On her last pass, a double pike, she stepped out again, resulting in another penalty. Lee stared up at the scoreboard, her evident nerves detectable beneath her black mask. Andrade’s score appeared—13.666—and Lee seemed overcome with emotion. She embraced her coach and brought her hands—the nails manicured with Olympic rings—to her face. She had won gold, preserving the American all-around streak in Biles’s absence. (Andrade took silver, winning Brazil’s first Olympic medal for women’s gymnastics in history, and Melnikova, from Russia, won bronze.)
Lee’s presence at the Tokyo Games wasn’t a certainty the way that Biles’s was. In the past few years, she has suffered a string of personal tragedies and professional setbacks. In 2019, just before Lee left for the national championships, her father fell off a ladder and sustained a spinal-cord injury that left him in a wheelchair. (She competed anyway: “He told me to go, that he really wanted me to go,” she told the Times. “So I did.”) Two months later, at the world championships, Lee helped the team win gold and took home bronze and silver medals herself, on the bars and the floor. She peaked just in time for the 2020 Olympics, but then the pandemic struck, her gym shut down, and, like the rest of her teammates, she had to pause training. In June of 2020, only two weeks after she returned, she twisted her left ankle on a fall from the uneven bars. The injury forced her to sit out for three more months; she worked on strength and conditioning but practiced no full routines. The same summer, she lost a beloved aunt and uncle after both contracted COVID-19, and she had a COVID scare herself.
One unfortunate element of the Tokyo Games is that, because of the pandemic, the family members of athletes aren’t there to cheer them on in person. (An exception is Carey’s father, who is also her coach.) Last week, during an interview with the two-time Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman, I asked her mother, Lynn, who sat with us, what the parents of this year’s athletes must be going through. During the 2012 and 2016 Games, Lynn and Raisman’s father, Rick, became Internet sensations for their lively body language in the stands. Parents of this year’s athletes must be happy that their kids have made it to Tokyo, Lynn told me, but “I’m sure it’s just so stressful for them.” Lee, who is from St. Paul, Minnesota, is the first Hmong American gymnast to have qualified for the Olympics. She has said that she hoped to bring home a gold medal for her father, for her large family, and for the Hmong community as a whole. Perhaps the greatest highlight of Thursday’s competition was a clip of Lee’s family members gathered around the live broadcast at an early-morning watch party in Minnesota. When the final scores appeared on the screen, Lee’s mother, standing at the front of the crowd, erupted first. Then the room filled with cheers.
