‘Simple Phone Call’ Pulled Rotting Suni Lee Out of Bed Despite Battling 2 Kidney Diseases

Gymnastics has witnessed scores of resilient athletes rise back up and get on their feet, even when all the odds were stacked against them. From Simone Biles overcoming the twisties to Gabby Douglas losing her thirst for the sport but never backing down from challenges, it seems like Suni Lee has followed suit too. With the Paris Olympics drawing to a close, she’ll pretty much be doing the heavy lifting on the mats alongside Biles, Douglas and many more. But amidst this sunny optimism, what many seem to forget is that she battled not one, but two debilitating kidney diseases, in the prime of her life, no less.

On the fateful day of 4th January 2024, things started looking up for the wunderkind. Being as cryptic as possible, she divulged key details about the call being her raison d’être to get back to the mats and give it her all. With that being said, it’s worth glossing over what that clandestine phone call actually entailed.

Suni Lee is back with a flourish, and the Olympics comes knocking on her door

Suni Lee recently spoke at the USA Media Summit in New York City about the call that pretty much turned over a new leaf for her. Olympics.com covered a segment on Lee where she spoke at great length about the same. A normal phone call made her stand on her feet. She couldn’t explain the nature of her reaction or the identity of the caller but she revealed that it greatly impacted her life and her course of actions, professional overtures wise. Suni Lee said, “It was just a simple phone call, I don’t know if I can really talk about it – I can’t really talk about it, but it was a simple phone call.”   While it can be fair play to speculate who the caller might be, anyone ranging from a mere relative to even a reliable teammate who meant well, one thing’s for sure. Suni Lee did jump back from adversity like a phoenix from the ashes and registered a stellar performance at the Winter Cup in Louisville, Kentucky.

Lee had pretty much kept the Paris Olympics dream on the back-burner, until the day the call came to her rescue. An ecstatic Lee said, “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I am going back into the gym tomorrow and I am going to be better than I ever was.’ That was the day I was like, ‘Yep, this what I want and I’m gonna put my mind into it.”‘ Lee has so far competed twice in the former half of 2024, pretty heroically and impressively too, might we add.

While still rusty, as was evident in her performance at the Winter Cup, fortitude shone through and trumped her minor faux pas. She even competed at the revered American Classic and registered a whopping double-event qualifying score on both the balance beam and the vault. With incremental improvements towards the behemoth games, which is a high stakes battle, Lee will hope to be on top of her game. With all that out of the way, we’d be remiss if we didn’t shine a light on her weakest moments, now, wouldn’t we?

Failure was Suni Lee’s springboard to success

Suni Lee had expressed a fervent desire to cut short her Auburn Gymnastics journey short due to her impending kidney issue. She’d even taken to her socials that she was dealing with a –“non-gymnastics related issue involving my kidneys.” With this driving a spanner in her plans, her incurable kidney disease morphed the usually peppy starburst gymnast into a vegetable “rotting in her bed”.

Lee gained 45 pounds. Her body and eyes changed for the worse and became swollen due to her ailment. She said she couldn’t fit into her clothes at that time. Lee’s stamina wasn’t on her side, and she had to change her diet to lower sodium content. With simple apparatuses becoming a monumental task for her, one person who stayed by her side was her coach Jess Graba. She recalled bemoaning that –“He’s part of the reason why I got back out of my slump.”

With a solid roadmap ahead in her peripheral vision, doting teammates and ramping scores in her performances of late, it remains to be seen how well Suni Lee will be faring this year.