Suni Lee captivated the world with the performance of a lifetime inside the Ariake Gymnastics Centre in Tokyo.
The 18-year-old gymnast and soon-to-be Auburn freshman dazzled on the sport’s biggest stage, claiming gold in the women’s gymnastics all-around final Thursday, finishing with a total score of 57.433 to hold off Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade and win the marquee event for Team USA for the fifth straight Summer Olympics. Lee’s breakthrough performance in Tokyo was the culmination of a lifetime of hard work and sacrifice by the St. Paul, Minn., native, but it also came thanks — in part — to a collaborative team effort between her current coach, Jess Graba, and her future coach, Auburn’s Jeff Graba, from half a world away.
Jess Graba has been Lee’s coach at Midwest Gymnastics since she was 6 years old, and he has been by her side as part of Team USA in Tokyo this summer, helping Lee on her path to — so far — two medals at these Olympics. While he has been working with her firsthand throughout this journey, Jeff Graba has been watching intently from Auburn, where Lee is still expected to arrive this fall.
The two brothers talk by phone about twice a day, Jeff often serving as a sounding board for Jess.
“I help him do his math,” Jeff Graba said Thursday afternoon. “This was his thing. He knows this code of points. He knows his athlete. But a lot of times he’ll just bounce ideas off me.”
It was over the last several days, between the women’s qualifying round Sunday and Thursday’s all-around final, that the two concocted a plan, in coordination with Lee, to help give her the best chance at taking home gold.
Since arriving in Tokyo, Lee added a fourth tumbling pass to her floor routine to try to maximize her point total in the event, which is considered one of her weaker ones. Lee first executed that four-pass routine in Sunday’s qualifying round, putting up a 13.433 on her way to a 57.166 all-around score.
Then when Lee was thrust into the event during the team final on Tuesday in the wake of Simone Biles’ withdrawal due mental health concerns, Lee again performed the four-pass routine. She upped her score that time to 13.666 while helping Team USA win the silver medal.
Lee hadn’t expected to perform on floor during the team final and relied on her routine from the preliminary round, but during those two days between rounds—and the two leading up to Thursday’s all-around final—she was focused on reworking her floor routine. The Graba twins noticed after the qualifying round how the Olympic judges were scoring four-pass routines, and they felt deductions were being taken on the final pass.
“We figured there was a way to get around that,” Jeff Graba said.
The plan was to eliminate the fourth pass from the routine altogether, going back to three tumbling passes on floor, in hopes that any points sacrificed by one fewer pass could be made up by stronger execution throughout the routine. The thought was that if they could do that and Lee could get an all-around score in the 57.5 range, that she would be in position to win the gold medal. If she could get to 57.2, they felt comfortable that she would at least medal.
“We were trying to squeeze an extra 10th (of a point) out of floor, and we figured we could do that,” Jeff Graba said. “… I’m saying ‘we,’ but I’m just helping my brother. He’s bouncing ideas off of me. This is not my game, but that was the plan. I would have to say he’s been right on every single thing he’s done with her for probably five years. I’m just telling you there’s a lot of times people told him to change his approach; there’s a lot of times people told him to treat her differently, to coach her differently, and he just stuck to his guns…. He and her are a tremendous team.”
That adjustment turned out golden for Lee on Thursday. She entered the final rotation on floor holding a 0.167-point edge in the all-around, and her three-pass routine garnered her top floor score of the week — 13.700. Her difficulty of 5.6 was down slightly from the 5.7 she threw during the team final, but her she made up for it in execution — as planned — with an 8.1, up from the 7.966 on her four-pass routine in the team final two days earlier.
It was enough to keep her in the lead and ultimately stave off Andrade, who stepped out of bounds at the end of two of her tumbling passes during her final floor routine, resulting in a 0.4-point deduction, a 13.666 in the event and an all-around total of 57.298.
It was a moment of triumph for Lee — for America, for her hometown of St. Paul and the Hmong-American community. It was also one of relief, both inside the Ariake Gymnastics Centre and back in Auburn.
“Everybody thinks it’s exciting,” Jeff Graba said. “It’s relief for me. And I think my brother would probably say the same thing. You know, as a coach, you want to give your athletes what they deserve. You want to give them as much as you can. You can’t do it for them. But you definitely don’t want to make a mistake on the way there. That’s why, I believe, I would say that he’s relieved that he gave her exactly what she needed, but it was up to her.
“She was the one who went out and did it. So, she deserves all the credit in the world. The rest of us watching, we knew what she was capable of. I’m just relieved. I’ve known it for years…. I’ve been saying this for years, this kid’s special. She is capable. Look guys, I thought she was capable of beating Simone. She did on the last day of the Olympic Trials. This kid’s capable of this.”
Lee is still capable of more at these Olympics. She will have two more medal opportunities in the coming days, with the individual finals for uneven bars on Sunday and balance beam on Tuesday still looming. Then, once the Summer Games are over, the world’s new No. 1 gymnast will head off to Auburn, where she’ll begin a new partnership with Jeff Graba.
“It’s one of the best athletes in the world — not just gymnasts in the world, one of the best athletes in the world has chosen to come to Auburn,” he said. “I take it as a big deal that she was coached by my brother and chose to be coached by me for the next four years. It says something about the way that my brother has coached her that she wants to continue that philosophy.”
Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.