Breaking: 2020 Olympic All-Around Champion Suni Lee Announces Comeback!

“I KNOW WHAT I’M CAPABLE OF”

Two years out from the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, 2020 Olympic All-Around Champion and 6-time Olympic medalist Suni Lee has announced her comeback to gymnastics in an Instagram post Tuesday morning simply captioned: “I’m back”

Lee joins her 2024 Olympic teammates Jade Carey and Hezly Rivera in the race for LA. Last month, Jordan Chiles told Inside Gymnastics she also hasn’t ruled out a comeback.

In the video post Lee noted: “This is more than a comeback… stay tuned.”

Photo: Ricardo Bufolin for Inside Gymnastics magazine

The following is an excerpt from Inside Gymnastics’ 2024 Olympic Commemorative Issue

Together, They Rose

By Christy Sandmaier

In an Olympic Games that was undeniably epic in every way, Simone Biles was crowned the Women’s All-Around Champion. In doing so, she became the first woman to win an individual Olympic gymnastics event twice in a non-consecutive Games, and joined legends Larisa Latynina of the Soviet Union and Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia as the only three women to win Olympic All-Around titles twice. 

Her score of 59.131 was 1.199 more than silver medalist Rebeca Andrade of Brazil (57.932). Suni Lee (USA), the reigning Olympic All-Around Champion, won bronze scoring 56.465.

All three women lit up the arena, all three with such remarkable stories of resilience and courage that we’ll long remember well after the Games. Each has had a piece in each other’s success, pushing limits, making each other better athletes, and elevating the sport to historic levels. Three women, all champions, inspired the next generation. Together, they rose and together, they have changed the sport forever.

The Inspiration

Since being crowned the 2020 Olympic All-Around Champion, Suni Lee’s journey has taken so many twists and turns to even get to the Bercy Arena, it’s beyond extraordinary. Determination, tenacity and resolve can only begin to describe her path to Paris and no one was more grateful than she was to return to the Games and compete on the All-Around stage. In fact, she was once so far away from her second Olympic dream, she nearly gave it all up. Overcoming illness, building back slowly and peaking at the perfect time, she’s now a two-time Olympic All-Around medalist.

“I really didn’t think that I would even get on the podium,” she said. “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’m so grateful that I had my coaches and, you know, having Simone here today definitely helped me a lot.” 

Guiding Suni through the Games was her belief in herself and on the final day she said, “This has been my redemption tour from the last Olympics.”