The journeys of Suni Lee, Shilese Jones, Leanne Wong and Joscelyn Roberson highlight the transformation of U.S. gymnastics.
MINNEAPOLIS — Look around the arena and it’s tough to know where to focus. On Friday night, an hour before the first of two days of competition that will determine the 2024 U.S. Olympic gymnastics team, the athletes have taken the floor to warm up. The Target Center is already filled with young fans holding signs and wearing shirts bearing their favorite gymnasts’ names. They’ve been on the long journey to this moment every step of the way. They know the routines by heart. They cheer every big skill. And they know what’s at stake this weekend.
Two-time world champion Shilese Jones, 21, cuts a striking image in a red, white and blue leotard as she stretches near the floor on the far side of the arena. The tape on her right shoulder, visible beneath sparkling sleeves, is a reminder of an injury she has battled for two years. When she was 12, Jones’ parents moved her family across the country to support her dream of being an Olympian. Nearly a decade later, this is her final shot at fulfilling that dream.
Leanne Wong, the 2024 NCAA uneven bars champion, sticks the landing on a double-layout dismount on bars and fist-bumps her coach. Wong, 20, was an alternate on the 2021 Olympic team but didn’t experience the Olympics. Now, having exchanged the orange and blue of the University of Florida Gators for a red, white and blue leo, she is exploring a new path for gymnasts to the Olympics through college.
Fans of Joscelyn Roberson hold their breath as the 18-year-old sprints down the vault runway for the first time tonight. They clap excitedly when she sticks her landing. It’s been eight months since Roberson landed short on a vault during warmups at world championships and tore ligaments in her left ankle. If her body holds up, it is her vaulting skills that will get her to Paris.
Sunisa Lee draws eyes to the balance beam as she warms up one of the most difficult, elegant beam routines in the world. Her performance on the apparatus in Tokyo helped her to become the first Asian American gymnast to win the Olympic all-around title, although she says most days she still feels like an imposter. Making the Paris team will give Lee, 21, the chance to prove her success in 2021 was no fluke — to herself as much as anyone.
These women, along with 11 others who are competing for five spots, came to this moment from different paths, but their individual stories highlight the collective cultural change that has transformed American gymnastics over the past decade.
Together, they make up the most competitive U.S. trials in history, a once-in-a-generation meeting of athletes made possible by the shift that followed the era overseen by longtime U.S. coaches Bela and Martha Karolyi, who enabled decades of favoritism, secrecy and abuse. These 15 gymnasts comprise a historic group: four Olympians, two Olympic all-around gold medalists, multiple world and NCAA champions, and a handful of hopefuls who came of Olympic age in the three years since Tokyo.
This is also the first trials overseen by 2008 Olympic teammates Alicia Sacramone Quinn and Chellsie Memmel, whom USA Gymnastics hired in 2022 to run the women’s national team. Both women know the joy of making a team — and the devastation of not — and they bring those experiences into the selection process. USAG has added more transparency and support structure to the process as well: An independent observer will attend the selection committee meeting Sunday night, and athletes who do not make the team will be allowed to join their families in a private room. Mental health professionals will be available to them. All of this would have been unimaginable in the Karolyi era.
In a sport that has long been overwhelmingly white, the 2024 Olympic team has the potential to be composed predominantly of women of color. It is also likely to be the oldest in history, much of the team able to celebrate hearing their names called by ordering a drink at the hotel bar.
Seven-time Olympic medalist Simone Biles is the favorite to win the meet and earn the only automatic nomination to the team. The committee will choose the additional four gymnasts, plus alternates, and announce their names within 30 minutes of Sunday’s final routine. This is the last chance for these athletes to prove they deserve a spot in Paris.
The harsh reality is most of these women will not hear their names called, and at least one of them will be a former Olympian, NCAA standout or world champion. Which means the next few days will be unbelievably exciting, gut-wrenchingly stressful and the culmination of many lifelong dreams.
SHILESE JONES IS fresh out of the bathtub as she sits in her bedroom awaiting an answer. She’s 12, a middle school student and a junior elite in Seattle.
Until recently, Jones was a talented gymnast but not the type of kid with posters of Olympians on her bedroom walls or dreams of wearing a red-white-and-blue leotard. She didn’t connect the experience she had practicing at her local gym with what Olympic gymnasts did on TV.
Then Gabby Douglas won the 2012 Olympic all-around title, the first Black gymnast to do so. «I was like, oh, this can be serious», Jones says. «This can go so much further than me just throwing flips.» Not long after, Jones met Douglas in person at a national team camp in Houston. Douglas’ coach even gave her pointers.
Jones realized she wasn’t all that different from the famous gymnasts she saw on TV, and she started to believe that one day she, too, could make an Olympic team. But she needed to train like an Olympian. «I thought, ‘You’re elite now, but you need to get somewhere where you’re training with other elites'», Jones says.
Jones started writing letters to her parents begging them to move to Columbus, Ohio, so she could train with Douglas and her coach. Her parents, Sylvester and Latrice, shook their heads. «They were like, ‘No. No. No . That’s way too far'», Jones says and laughs. «They’d ask me, ‘Do you know how far that is?’ I’d say, ‘No.'» She was 12. She didn’t care about the logistics of moving to Ohio. She just knew she needed to get there.
Her dad knew his middle daughter, whom everyone called «Shi», was persistent. It was he who taught her the family motto, «Joneses don’t quit», and drilled it into her. Since she was a kid, Sylvester had been Shi’s rock. Despite a long-term battle with kidney disease, he’d driven her to practices and meets, even on days when he was worn out from hours of dialysis. When she was young, he would sit in the gym and yell, «You got it, Shi!» when he knew she needed him to believe in her more than she believed in herself. He dreamed of seeing her compete on an Olympic stage.
Jones is persistent. She keeps writing letters, and one day, something changes.
«I remember I got out of the tub one day and wrote this long note about how I was going to work hard and go to the Olympics and why these coaches [in Ohio] would help me get there», Jones says. «Whatever it takes, I’ll do this. This is where I need to be.»
She hands it to her parents, then runs to her room. Her parents read the letter, which has a more serious tone than the previous ones she’d written. They realize she isn’t going to stop asking.
«Finally, after that note, it set in», Jones says. «And they were like, ‘OK, we’re moving.'»
JONES BOARDS HER flight home to Seattle, a medal packed safely in her luggage, and smiles. The all-around silver medalist in her first world championships, she has come so far in the past year since she decided to return to elite gymnastics and make a run at the Paris Games. Less than two years earlier, she had walked away from the sport.
Before the Tokyo Olympics were postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Jones was «in the best shape of my life», she says, and a strong contender to make the team. But in January 2021, five months before the rescheduled trials, she fractured her back and left foot in a car accident.
«The doctor wanted me to be on bed rest for three months», she says. «And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s not going to work. This is not the end.'» She rested for a month, started rehab and returned to the gym two months before trials. «Each day I tried to get as far as I could», she says. «There was never a time where I was like, ‘Just give up.’ I put the accident aside and kept pushing. But mentally we knew I wasn’t ready.»
Jones finished 10th, one spot from being named to the team as a replacement athlete. «I always told my parents, ‘If I try for the first Olympics and don’t make it, I’m going to move on'», Jones says. «I’ve said that since I was 4. And that was super important to me.»
She didn’t watch the Olympics on TV, didn’t go to the gym and started thinking about what to do next. She had previously committed to the gymnastics program at the University of Florida but deferred her freshman year. Maybe she would join the Gators in the fall.
But then Biles invited her to perform in her post-Tokyo tour, which kicked off in late September. With each show, Jones started to rethink her future. «So many girls, Olympians and world champions I look up to, were like, ‘Oh, you’re not done'», Jones says. «And tumbling again for the first time in several months, everything clicked back so fast. I was enjoying myself.»
When the tour ended in November, Jones returned to Ohio and went back to the gym with no plan other than to have fun and work on a few new skills. A month later, the unthinkable happened. Sylvester, who had fought for so long, died because of complications from kidney disease.
Jones was devastated. But as she leaned on her mother and sisters for support, they reminded her of the family motto Sylvester had taught her: Joneses don’t quit. She thought about what he had always told her and started to consider all that she still wanted to accomplish in elite gymnastics.
«Both my parents were so supportive», Jones says. «My mom is super proud of me. But my dad pushed me more. He always said, ‘You’re a champion, Shi’, and I’d say, ‘Dad, why do you keep saying that?’ He’d say, ‘Because you’re a champion.’ I feel I’ve learned to believe that within myself.»
After his death, Jones and her mom and younger sister moved back to Seattle. With her family’s support, Jones recommitted herself to making it to the Olympics to honor the belief her dad had in her — and that she now had in herself. «Joneses don’t quit», she says. «Every day, I think, ‘Make today count. What you do in this practice, take something away from it.’ That’s what I strive for and what pushes me every single day to not give up.»
Jones needed a new coach. She scheduled a Zoom meeting with Sarah Korngold, who lived outside of Seattle and had experience coaching elites. The two women immediately connected. Korngold remembered Jones from national team development camps as a young gymnast with great artistry who needed refinement. But when she came into Korngold’s gym to work out for the first time in early 2022, Korngold was wowed.
«Shi’s physically incredibly gifted but also so driven, so hardworking, so kind and giving of her energy, knowledge and time», she says. «She moved away from Seattle to reach a different tier, which requires a different level of commitment. Being her coach, I don’t want to say there’s pressure, but it’s a big responsibility. And I do not take it lightly.»
In Liverpool, Jones takes a giant leap on her path toward Paris. With Biles taking time off, she is the top American gymnast in the world right now. Even if Biles returns, Jones believes she has the skills, consistency and determination to become an all-around champion. «My dad always told me, ‘Shi, this is your journey'», Jones says. «You didn’t sign up to be in anyone’s shadow.»
SUNI LEE MOUTHS the words to the national anthem from the top of the Olympic all-around podium inside Tokyo’s Ariake Gymnastics Center. This moment should be the highlight of her young career, but all she wants is to run and hide. «It’s something I’m still working on learning to accept», Lee says, «the fact that I won.»
Lee was a force in the run-up to the 2021 Olympics and even outscored Biles in the all-around on Day 2 of Olympic trials. In Tokyo, she was a favorite to win gold on uneven bars, contest for a medal in the all-around and help the team win gold.
But then Biles withdrew from competition citing a dangerous loss of air awareness that gymnasts refer to as the «twisties», and Lee stepped up and performed beautifully day after day. During the team final, she was the stoic rock of Team USA and put up the highest score of the meet, a 15.4 on bars. In the all-around, she nailed her routines to win the most coveted title in gymnastics. Her coaches and teammates tried to reassure her that even if Biles had competed, Lee still could have won. She was the best gymnast in the world that day. She earned the win.
«But in the back of my head I’m like, ‘Oh, you didn’t deserve it'», Lee says.
