Inside Suni Lee‘s road back to the Olympics

CATHY WURZER: Huh, Suni looked pretty perfect to most of us. The road back to the Olympics has been anything but easy for her, though. She was diagnosed with two kidney diseases in 2022, had to stop training. And a new, New York Times profile reveals she was also dealing with stalkers and mental health issues. Juliet Macur is the reporter behind that profile. Juliet is in Paris right now, was at the team finals yesterday, and she's taking time to talk with us right now. Thank you so very much for joining us.

JULIET MACUR: Oh, you're welcome.

CATHY WURZER: Suni looks fantastic. Her performances yesterday were strong. And you put that up against what you wrote about when it comes to her health problems. I don't think the general public really knew how serious those challenges were and perhaps still will be for Suni. Did she really think there was a chance she wasn't going to ever make it back in the gym again because of those health problems?

JULIET MACUR: Oh, I think it has been a very, very tough road for her. And I don't think the public really understands how tough it is. Many times, she said she just wanted to quit, stay in her bed with her dog under the covers, just never go back to the gym again because she just never thought that she would-- what she called it, the old Suni. The old Suni was gone and would never be back.

And she was dealing with a lot of exhaustion and different ligament problems because of the drug she was taking. And she thought that her gymnastics career was over. So, to see her yesterday, a big smile on her face every time she landed a routine, and then with a gold medal around her neck, I think she's just as surprised as everybody else.

CATHY WURZER: The story mentioned she moved to LA to appear on the show Dancing with the Stars. And you had this quote that Lee felt she was narrowly hanging on as this new and abnormal life came at her. She really seemed like she was having a hard time with the enormous success and just everything that was surrounding that, the health problems. So was she in a deep depression?

JULIET MACUR: Well, at first, when she was in LA, she didn't know she had kidney disease or didn't have any of the symptoms of it. She was an 18-year-old kid, put in a two-bedroom apartment, and Dancing with the Stars out there by herself with no family, no friends. Her coaches were-- who they're very close to her-- back in Minnesota. They visited her every couple of weeks to give her support. She wasn't in school. She was starting Auburn with online classes.

I think any one of us would be depressed, much less somebody who's 18 years old and never lived on her own, trying to figure out life, and this great big spotlight on her as this new celebrity, which she didn't expect because everyone thought Simone Biles was going to win the all-around gold medal in Tokyo.

And when Simone pulled out with a mental block, Suni came in, won the gold medal, and was thrust into this celebrity that she just wasn't prepared for or used to. So I don't know if it was depression, but she certainly had a lot of sadness, and she was pretty scared and lonely during that whole time.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, my gosh. And plus, I think no one really knew, except close friends and family. And it was one of the more disturbing revelations in your stories that she was dealing with stalkers, including a guy who tracked her down in three states. How in the world did that affect her?

JULIET MACUR: Yeah, she just couldn't be a regular kid. And I think Suni just expected to be a regular kid even after the Olympics. She just showed up on Auburn's campus for college, wanted to go to the cafeteria, walk across campus, go to classes. But people were following her around, taking pictures of her while she was eating, slipping notes under her dorm door, asking her for pictures.

And she's really not the type of person who wants that kind of attention. She's super humble, super sweet. And she just wants to be a normal kid and just wasn't really prepared for any of it. And I think it was-- it's not just being a celebrity. It's being a celebrity to the 100th degree, where she just ended up in her room on campus, taking online classes from inside her dorm room, which is absolutely wild that she couldn't didn't even feel comfortable walking across campus.

CATHY WURZER: Mm, wow. It sounds like Simone Biles really helped Suni out, that she gave her kind of a pep talk, and it seemed like it worked. Can you talk about that?

JULIET MACUR: Yeah, to me, this is a really interesting new friendship that they forged during and before this Olympics. Before, in Tokyo, they weren't that close in Tokyo. And after everything that Simone went through in Tokyo with her mental health issues, with the mental block and the anxiety there, she saw that Suni was really, really nervous at nationals this year and went to her and talked to her and gave her, basically, a pep talk, saying, listen, you're here for you. You can do this. You could be the best that you could be.

And really, Suni just needed somebody to hold her hand and say, listen, you've been through a lot, but you can do more. And that person was Simone Biles, just the best gymnast in history. And now you could see that the team is really close.

Even just last night-- or two nights ago, before the team final, they were all laying on the ground and talking about how they need to be more open with each other with their worries and their anxiety before these events. And that's something I've never seen in gymnastics, or, really, any Olympic sport in the history of time, especially in this particular sport, where athletes have always sort of been trained to be silent and obedient.

CATHY WURZER: Isn't that interesting, how the conversation has changed around mental health, especially among elite athletes? And I wonder, what can you attribute that to?

JULIET MACUR: Well, there's been a lot of changes over the years. A lot of several key athletes have come forward, including someone like Michael Phelps, the swimmer who came forward with his mental health challenges. And of course, what happened with Simone in Tokyo under the bright lights, with tens of millions of people watching all over the world. She pulled out of the competition and told everyone that she couldn't do it because of a mental block.

It was this-- she called it a trauma response for all the trauma that she had in her life, including being abused by the former national team doctor, Lawrence Nassar. She's been completely open about going to a therapist every Thursday. She never misses that session. She's taken anxiety medication and has anxiety and has these visualizations before every event now, just to calm herself down.

And she's just been so open about it that other athletes have told me, over the last couple of weeks, listen, if she's doing this kind of stuff, I also can tell people that I'm nervous or I'm struggling. And then, in that way, they can get support from other athletes because I think they don't realize that they're all pretty much in the same boat when it comes to anxiety on a certain level. And Simone just opened this door to all these ways of supporting each other. And it's really amazing to see.

I mean, I've covered gymnastics for a very long time, and it was the opposite just years ago, where nobody said anything about being nervous, certainly, or being anxious or having these other issues. And now it's completely changed. It's just so wonderful to see this new world.

CATHY WURZER: Oh, it really is. So knowing all of this-- and getting back to Suni here-- I mean, quite a comeback story, obviously. So you kind of alluded to this at the beginning of our conversation. It was such a joyful experience, then, to watch her compete yesterday, knowing all that you've known about and written about.

JULIET MACUR: Absolutely. We're sitting there, watching, and watching her routine and everybody's pretty quiet in the arena. And every time she landed a dismount, she would smile so big. And you know that there was just so much joy and somewhat relief in what she was doing, because she said after Olympic trials, that a year ago, she'd never thought this was possible. She thought that she would never be the gymnast that she used to be.

And here we are. She won a gold medal. She helped the team win a gold medal yesterday. Tomorrow, she'll go for the-- try to defend her all-around title. And it's like almost a miracle to think about it because she doesn't have just one kidney disease. She has two. She hasn't told anyone what the names of them are, but I know that she's struggled with different medications, trying to figure out ways for her to take the medication and also train at the level that she's used to.

So it's been a really long road for her. And it's just so nice to see that she's able to reach the Olympics and even win medals when she never thought that she was going to go back to the sport in the first place.

CATHY WURZER: Final question for you here, Juliet. I know you're going to be watching here the rest of the week with Suni and the other women on the team. What are you going to be looking for with these individual event competitions coming up?

JULIET MACUR: Well, everybody's thinking about Simone Biles, see how many medals she can win before she maybe perhaps ends her gymnastics career here. That's sort of up in the air right now, whether she's going to retire after these Olympics. But yeah, people will be looking at the Americans. Suni's goal was to win the balance beam gold medal and to win any medal on uneven bars. So I think a lot of people will be looking to see if she could do that.

And with Simone, looking to see whether she could just stay focused and keep that anxiety at bay and just do what she does best, which is perform the best gymnastics, not only of her generation, but of, in my opinion, in the history of the sport. So people will be looking, looking to see how many medals she comes home with.

CATHY WURZER: Well, Juliet, pleasure talking to you. Good reporting. Thank you so very much. And enjoy your assignment in Paris.

JULIET MACUR: You're great. Thank you so much for having me.

CATHY WURZER: Juliet Macur is the New York Times reporter covering the Olympics and following the journey of St. Paul's Suni Lee.