TOKYO — Most Olympic all-around champions celebrate the biggest prize in gymnastics by going on the star circuit: talk shows, red carpets, a nationwide tour.
Suni Lee is going to college.
Lee, the fifth consecutive U.S. woman to win the Olympic all-around title, said Friday that she leaves for Auburn on Aug. 10 or 11.
As in, two weeks from now.
“I'll get to be a college athlete, doing school stuff and going to classes. It'll be fun staying in the dorms, getting away from gymnastics and just having a little bit more free time than I normally would,” Lee said. “Which is something I'm super excited about because I've spent so much time in the gym that it's just nice to have this little break.”
Auburn’s coach is Jeff Graba, whose twin brother Jess is Lee’s coach. She has long wanted to go to Auburn, and committed there well before she made the Tokyo team.
She acknowledged that the all-around gold brings some commercial opportunities she didn’t expect, but she doesn’t want to take advantage of them at the expense of the college experience.
Besides, with the new name, image and likeness rules, she will still be able to cash in on her celebrity while she’s at Auburn. Maybe even make as much, or more, money as she would if she simply went pro.
“I don’t know all the information that goes into it but … it seems you can do a bunch of stuff,” Lee said. “It’s something I have to keep learning about because there are a lot of rules, and I don’t want to mess up my scholarship.”
Those are concerns for another day, however.
Lee said it still hasn’t sunk in that she is the Olympic champion. She came to Tokyo expecting that the best she could do was a silver medal because the gold was all but assured of going to Simone Biles. The 2016 Olympic champion hasn’t lost an all-around competition, and Lee was second to her at both the U.S. championships and Olympic trials last month.
But Biles withdrew from the team and all-around competitions after mental health concerns manifested themselves in “the twisties,” a loss of awareness of where she is in the air. The terrifying condition actually puts gymnasts in physical danger because they have no idea where, or how, they’re going to land a skill.
The absence of Biles opened the door for Lee and she capitalized on it, joining Carly Patterson, Nastia Liukin, Gabby Douglas and Biles in what is now a two-decade reign of U.S. women in the Olympics’ glamour event. No surprise, then, that Lee’s phone and social media accounts have been blowing up since she won Thursday night, with celebrities such as Reese Witherspoon and LeBron James mentioning her.
“I was talking to my sister yesterday and she's like, `Suni, you're actually famous now. Before you were kind of famous, but now everywhere you go, people are going to know who you are because it's the Olympics,’ ” Lee said. “I'm hoping that I'm going to be normal.”
Lee had the day off Friday, and spent much of it making the media rounds. But she’ll be back in training Saturday for the event finals. She qualified for Sunday’s uneven bars final, where she is a favorite to win another gold, as well as Tuesday’s balance beam final.
“I feel like people are putting a lot of pressure on me to win bars,” said Lee, whose routine is the most difficult in the world. “I’m just competing for myself and seeing where I can get. I want to know how good I am, and where I stand.”
On Thursday night, that was atop a podium at the Tokyo Olympics. Soon, it will be with all the other Auburn freshman, trying to adjust to college life.
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