Olympic Gymnastics Updates: Sunisa Lee Wins All-Around Gold (Published 2021) (2024)

TOKYO — For years, Sunisa Lee, a teenager from Minnesota who became the Olympic all-around gymnastics champion on Thursday night, wasn’t training just for herself.

Lee, a Hmong American, went to the gym every day for all the first-generation Americans who wanted to achieve success when their parents had come to the United States with nothing. And she trained through grueling practices and painful injuries for her father, John, who suffered a spinal cord injury in 2019 and now uses a wheelchair.

Jade Carey hits an amazingly difficult floor routine, featuring a double-twisting double layout, a double-twisting double tuck, a full-twisting double layout and a full-twisting double tuck. She won’t win a medal today, but she still has the vault and floor finals next week.

Rebeca Andrade is the first woman ever to win an all-around medal of any color for a country that did not qualify a full team to the Olympic Games.

What’s next for Lee? It’s sure to be a whirlwind, but as of now she has plans in the future to compete for the gymnastics team at Auburn University in Alabama. The brother of Jess Graba, her coach, heads the team there.

Suni Lee is the fifth American in a row to win the women’s Olympic all-around title, following Carly Patterson in 2004, Nastia Liukin in 2008, Gabby Douglas in 2012 and Simone Biles in 2016. No other country has a streak like that in the women’s all-around. The closest any country has come is the Soviet Union, whose gymnasts won three consecutive all-around gold medals in 1952, 1956 and 1960.

Lee is in a very exclusive group now: Only 16 women have an Olympic all-around title to their name.

Rebeca Andrade wins the silver medal — the first medal ever for Brazil in women’s gymnastics — and Angelina Melnikova wins the bronze.

SUNISA LEE IS THE OLYMPIC ALL-AROUND CHAMPION.

Andrade needs a 13.802 on floor to win the gold.

Lee moves into first place with a 13.7, meaning she is guaranteed at least a silver medal! Andrade is up now.

Urazova had some leg form issues in her first tumbling pass, a piked full-in, and a couple steps on the landing. The rest of her routine was cleaner, and she finished with a stuck landing on a double twist.

Suni Lee hits her floor routine, starting with an extremely difficult double-twisting double back.

Angelina Melnikova looking absolutely terrified as she waits for her score. It’s a 13.966, moving her into first place with Suni Lee and Rebeca Andrade still to come. She seems happy enough with that score.

It’s worth noting that Urazova’s Russian teammate Viktoria Listunova didn’t move on to the all-around because of the two-per country rule. Listunova certainly would have been in contention for a medal, possibly gold, here.

Urazova is the youngest of the women in contention for the gold. At just 16, she is new to the international scene on the senior level and let’s just say she’s doing a pretty good job of adjusting.

Nina Derwael hits her floor routine, but it’s much less difficult than what we’ll see from the other top contenders. Only two tumbling passes compared with four for many others.

This is going to be really close. If the four leaders each scored exactly the same on floor exercise as they did in the qualifying round, the final rankings would be Andrade, Melnikova, Urazova, with Lee shut out of the medals in fourth. But the gap between first and fourth would be only about four tenths.

just a note to remind you that Olympic gymnasts fall sometimes and YOOOUCH. A handful have done what looks like a belly flop while warming up on the uneven bars and that BOOM is cringeworthy. Then they get up and do it again and again.

Before performing her balance beam routine, you could tell that Sunisa Lee was nervous. She was squatting and staring at the floor. And then pacing. And then took deep breath after deep breath, her hand on her belly to calm herself. Her jitters remained throughout her routine, too.

She wobbled several times and caught herself from falling back after completing her wolf turn, which is done with one leg entirely bent so her body is close to the beam and the other leg is straight. But she didn’t fall, and that was key. Her landing was solid, with no steps. She received a 13.833, enough to put her into the lead. Going into the final apparatus, the floor exercise, the top three gymnasts: Lee, Russia’s Vladislava Urazova (now second) and Andrade (third) are separated by just two-tenths of a point. Any one of them could win gold.

What an exciting competition. The difficulty score, a 6.1, in Sunisa Lee’s beam routine was key. Rebeca Andrade’s routine had a 5.6.

Rebeca Andrade hit her beam routine with only a step backward on her double pike dismount, but a score of 13.566 moves her from first place into third. Going into the final rotation, Suni Lee is in first with 43.733, Vladislava Urazova is in second with 43.566, and Andrade is in third with 43.532.

Suni Lee scored 13.833, a little under four tenths lower than in the qualifying round. Part of that was the wobble on the wolf turn, but I think she also had a slightly lower difficulty score than planned — she usually does a double wolf turn immediately after the triple wolf turn, and she didn’t today.

Suni Lee has an incredible save on beam. She was off balance, leaning backward, on her triple wolf turn but managed to stay on, pressing her foot against the side of the beam. The core strength it takes to do that…

Over on the sidelines, one of the gymnasts currently on vault is doing handstands, lifting one hand at a time and rotating on the other arm as her coach holds her up. A glimpse of warmups for uneven bars!

Sunisa Lee’s uneven bars routine is the hardest in the world, with her flying over and between the bars so gracefully that it looks like she’s dancing in midair. She has been dreaming of winning the Olympic medal in this event during apparatus finals next week, and she is certainly one of the favorites to do it.

Her bars routine just now was the best of her group, even better than Nina Derwael’s. Derwael is Lee’s biggest competition on bars and it showed in their scores. Lee had 15.3 points, while Derwael had 15.266. That strong score launched Lee into second place overall, just 0.66 points behind Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade. With two more events to go, we’re halfway done, and the rest of the night is going to be a nail-biter.

Sunisa Lee flew up and around the uneven bars as she connected some of the hardest maneuvers done on the apparatus. She scored a 15.3, just a tenth below her mark in the team final. No one does a bars routine as complex as Lee’s.