Tokyo Olympics | ‘Doesn't feel like real life’: US gymnast Sunisa Lee’s journey to gold

For the 18-year-old gymnast, Tokyo Olympics was a distant dream. Before the US championship, which was to decide her qualification for the Olympics, she wanted to quit.

Even as the urge to quit faded, she still had to overcome self-doubt.

Lee's perseverance kept her going. She qualified for the Olympics but was never confident of clinching gold. Her best shot, according to her, was silver as Simone Biles, her teammate, who has four Olympic gold medals and 19 world titles, was everyone's bet for the top spot.

However, Biles pulled out of the game on July 29 to focus on her mental health.

The competition opened for Lee. Before the game, she video called her father John, who asked her to keep calm.

She didn't want to bite more than she could chew and thus, opted for a routine with three tumbling passes instead of four. Her focus was clear — better execution.

Her closest competitor, Brazil's Rebeca Andrade, who secured the best floor score during qualifying rounds, required a score of 13.802 to win. She received a 13.666 instead.

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For Lee, the victory was surreal. This was the fifth straight Olympic win by a US woman in gymnastics. In fact, the last three Olympic champions, including Lee, are women of colour.

Lee belongs to Hmong ethnicity, a native of the mountains of Southeast Asia. Her family moved from Laos to Minnesota that has the largest concentration of Hmong in the US.

In the protests that followed Goerge Floyd’s death last year, many Hmong American businesses were vandalised and several homes in Lee’s neighbourhood were broken into.

“People hate on us for no reason...It would be cool to show that we are more than what they say. I don’t know how to explain that…” Lee told Elle magazine.