St. Paul gymnast Suni Lee pulls up to Midwest Gymnastics in Little Canada shortly after 4 p.m. It’s a hot summer day in early July, and the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris are quickly approaching.

She makes casual conversation with a couple of coaches on the mat as the local gym quickly starts to fill in around her. She puts the finishing touches on her warmup when a group of little kids rush in to give her a hug before their practice. She smiles and wraps her arms around them before heading to the balance beam to work on her routine.

The scene doesn’t make sense on the surface. You’ve got Lee working to perfect a tumbling pass under the watchful eye of longtime coaches Jess Graba and Ali Lim, then less than 50 feet away are a handful of 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds learning the basics of the sport. The whiplash is jarring for an outsider.

Not to Lee. The chaos inside Midwest Gymnastics has never bothered her. She has been working out there since she was a kid herself and has always found beauty in being able to blend in.

“This is her happy place,” Graba said. “She’s just another kid when she walks in here. She doesn’t have to worry about anything else. It’s like home for her.”

That feeling has been instrumental for Lee over the past few years.

The journey to qualify for another Olympics hasn’t been easy. Not only has she had to figure out how to handle fame at a young age after winning the gold medal in the all-around competition at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, she also has had to navigate an incurable kidney disease that nearly ended her career.

All the while Midwest Gymnastics has served as a safe space where she can go whenever things get overwhelming.

“I think it’s been a saving grace for all of us,” Lim said. “We can come in here and leave the rest of the stuff outside.”

The culmination will come this weekend in Paris for Lee with Olympic qualifications starting at 4:40 a.m. CST Sunday. local time. If things go according to plan, Lee will be competing in the team final and the all-around final next week. Frankly, no matter what happens, Lee can take pride in the fact that she made it back.

“I’ve learned that I’m a lot stronger than I think,” she said. “I’m capable of anything if I put my mind to it.”

How it helped her handle fame

Nothing was the same for Lee after winning the gold medal in 2020.

Everybody wanted a piece of her in the immediate aftermath.

She returned home to St. Paul and was greeted with a parade in her honor. She traversed the country on a media tour that featured countless public appearances as well as a trip to the Met Gala in Manhattan. She competed as a contestant on “Dancing With The Stars” alongside other celebrities.

“There were a lot of things on her plate,” Graba said. “You can’t prepare an 18-year-old for that.”

She handled it with grace every step of the way, and continued to do so once she got to Auburn University. As much as she enjoyed parts of her college experience, there were certain aspects that made it difficult for Lee to settle in and feel completely comfortable.

In an interview with Sports Illustrated, Lee highlighted some of the challenges, like how she had to opt for virtual classes because she couldn’t walk to class without a security detail. She added that her teammates at Auburn weren’t the nicest to her because of her stature.

She started to feel like an outcast. It was a far cry from her experience at Midwest Gymnastics back home where she felt love from everybody around her.

“The way she handled everything was so impressive to watch,” Lim said. “She’s just been so poised through it all.”

How it helped her navigate illness

After announcing on social media that she planned to leave Auburn to focus on qualifying for the Olympics, Lee was diagnosed with an incurable kidney disease that ultimately forced her to move back home sooner than expected. She stopped training completely while doctors tried to get things under control.

Forget the Olympics. She just wanted to be healthy.

“That was scary,” Graba said. “We had no idea what was going on.”

As she slowly started to learn more about it, Lee returned to Midwest Gymnastics, as a way to clear her head more than anything else. It wasn’t about training for the Olympics at that point. It was simply about feeling like herself, even if only for a few moments at a time.

“She can just come here and go about her business,” said Puner Koy, who coached her at Midwest Gymnastics when she was young. “That’s really important because she’s constantly under a microscope with everything else she has going on in her life.”

Eventually, Lee felt herself getting stronger, and she let herself start thinking about the Olympics. She talked to Graba and Lim, and they came up with a plan.

“It was a really hard transition for all of us after I got sick,” Lee said. “Just having to work through all of that, they almost had to relearn how to coach me.”

There were ups and downs as soon as they started training with a purpose. Sometimes she would wake up and her energy levels were so low that she could barely get out of bed. Sometimes she would wake up and her hands would be so swollen she couldn’t grip the uneven bars.

Whenever she was at Midwest Gymnastics, though, Lee was thrilled to be working toward something again.

“I’m so glad that I never gave up,” she said. “There were so many times where I thought about quitting.”

The hard work paid off last month at the Olympic Trials at Target Center in Minneapolis. After completing a ridiculous routine on the uneven bars, Lee had a pretty good idea that she had done enough to make the U.S. team. It became official a couple of hours later, and Lee burst into tears on the mat.

“The further away we get from it, the more we’ll realize how big of a deal it was,” Graba said. “It was relief more than anything in the moment. It was like a weight lifted off our shoulders. Now at least whatever happens it’s going to be happening at the Olympics.”

How it helped her appreciate success

Fittingly, after qualifying for the Olympics, Lee found herself back on the mat at Midwest Gymnastics. Never mind that she had accomplished her goal. There was still work to be done.

“There’s more in the tank,” Lee said. “I’m never going to be satisfied.”

Maybe the coolest part about seeing Lee in her element is observing the way some of the little kids perceive her. As much as she might exists as a celebrity when they watch her compete on television, she exists as a peer whenever they are in the gym together.

“She’s just Suni in their eyes,” said Eric Kangas, who coaches at Midwest Gymnastics. “She just so happens to be an Olympic champion.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t hilarious moments along the way, like earlier this year when Lee literally had to avoid a little kid while practicing her mount onto the balance beam.

“I was joking with her,” said Tony Maras, who got his start at Midwest Gymnastics, then went on to compete collegiately for Nebraska. “If she can train with a little kid running across the mat, she can go out there and compete at the Olympics, no problem.”

Asked about her goals heading into the Olympics, Lee said she would like to win a team gold medal more than anything else. She added that individually she would like to be competitive in the all-around final and that she also wants a gold medal on balance beam.

You can bet her family at Midwest Gymnastics will be following along every step of the way.

“We are so incredibly proud of her,” Lim said. “I would not want to do this with anybody else.”

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PARIS — The new sport for the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, which open Friday here and continue for 17 days, is breaking.

It is more commonly known as break dancing, but the dancing part has been removed, presumably, to deflect criticism and encourage its acceptance as a worthy athletic competition. It also fits the Paris Games in more semantic ways.

Because the goal, the hope, the aspiration of these Olympics, truly, is breaking.

Breaking with the recent trend of flawed Games, either from authoritarian governments (Sochi and Beijing), overwhelmed organizers (Rio de Janeiro), remote locales (Pyeongchang) or pandemic restrictions (Tokyo).

Breaking with the habit of building new venues that instantly become white elephants when the flame is extinguished at closing ceremonies.

Breaking even financially, avoiding the tsunami of cost overruns and red ink that have sunk past host cities.

Breaking with tradition, hosting the athletes’ parade before Friday’s opening ceremony on 94 barges over a four-mile stretch of the River Seine instead of monotonously marching into a stadium.

“It’s not perfect, it’s never perfect,” said Tony Estanguet, president of the Paris organizing committee and a three-time gold medalist in whitewater canoe. “I remember when I crossed the finish line when I was an athlete with the gold medal, I didn’t make a perfect run. Perfect is never the case, but it’s also important to assess what we are willing to deliver.

“We dared to be audacious, to be ambitious, to make sure the Games will not be the same as the previous editions.”

People pose for pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower with the Olympic rings prior to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Paris on Thursday, July 18, 2024. In addition to the athletes who will participate in the parade, 3,000 dancers, artists and other athletes will be featured in the opening and closing ceremonies. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/ SCNG)

They arrive at an inflection point in the Olympic movement, with declining viewership, with increasing cynicism from doping and corruption scandals, with cities reluctant to submit host bids, with longtime sponsors departing, with rising terrorist threats, with political decisions jeopardizing its purportedly neutral image.

Paris’ great advantage, and Los Angeles in 2028, is that it isn’t using the Olympics to attract tourism or revitalize a region or launder a political ideology through the interlocking rings.

A Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, created the modern Games in 1896 after seeing a model of ancient Olympia at the Paris Exposition. The city has hosted the Summer Games twice, in 1900 and 1924. France has hosted the Winter Games three times and will make it four in 2030 in the Alps.

The 1900 Games didn’t go so well, spread over five months with a litany of obscure sports such as equestrian high jump and a swimming obstacle race where competitors dove under a row of boats in the Seine.

Paris got another shot in 1924 and began shaping the current Olympics, introducing the “Citius, altius, fortius” motto (faster, higher, stronger) and a dedicated athlete village of wooden shacks. Johnny Weissmuller won two gold medals in swimming before starring as Tarzan in Hollywood movies. Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi took home five golds in track and field.

This, then, is about reshaping the Olympics. Resuscitating, revitalizing, reimagining, rebooting them.

“Light up people’s hearts,” French President Emmanuel Macron says.

The Arc De Triomphe at the top of Champs-Élysées prior to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Paris on Saturday, July 20, 2024. .The opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics is set for Friday. Instead of a traditional march into a stadium, about 10,500 athletes will parade on more than 90 boats on the Seine River. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/ SCNG)

One thing that hasn’t changed from 1900 is swimming in the River Seine. The swimming competition was held there back then, which the competitors liked because a) the river wasn’t as polluted then and b) the strong current meant world record times.

France spent $1.5 billion in a massive clean-up campaign in order to stage a triathlon leg and marathon swimming there, with mixed reviews. A protest movement with the threat #JeChieDansLaSeine (literally, “I poop in the Seine”) claims the water quality is still unhealthy, prompting Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo to take a dip herself in wetsuit and goggles.

Other venues, most of them in cost-efficient existing or temporary structures, have equally historic and photogenic backdrops.

Beach volleyball is in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, fencing and taekwondo in a renovated Grand Palais, skateboarding and breaking at Place de la Concorde, equestrian at the Chateau de Versailles, judo and wrestling at the Champ de Mars exhibition hall, the marathon start at Hotel de Ville, the road cycling course up Montmartre hill past the Sacre-Coeur basilica, tennis on the famed red clay of Roland-Garros.

Surfing is on a reef break off the French Polynesian island of Tahiti. Sailing is on the Cote d’Azur in Marseille.

The Olympic flame will be displayed not in a stadium but Jardin des Tuileries, a palace garden created by Catherine de Medici in the 1500s on the fashionable Right Bank of the Seine not far from the Louvre Museum.

“It’s been very rich,” Christophe Dubi, the Olympic Games executive director for the IOC, said of their journey with the Paris organizing committee, “with people that always had this attitude of, ‘Let’s create, let’s innovate, although Paris offers a lot of history and culture, let’s use this to make it something very special.’”

It’s not perfect, as Estanguet says, it’s never perfect. Not when you bring 11 million visitors to see 10,714 athletes from 206 nations compete in 329 events over 754 sessions in 35 venues.

The biggest challenge is security in a city that has suffered several major terrorist attacks, including one in 2015 that killed 130 people and was attributed to the Islamic State as retaliation for French air strikes in Syria and Iraq.

The result is what is considered the largest peacetime security operation in French history, with 45,000 officers drawn from police, military and dozens of foreign countries. In the past few days, groups of uniformed soldiers have appeared on street corners with guns slung across their chests while police are regularly posted at Metro stations. Speed boats with armed officers zoom up and down the Seine. Divers patrol beneath the surface.

A no-fly zone with a 100-mile radius will be imposed from 6:30 p.m. to midnight during opening ceremonies, forcing commercial airlines to cancel flights into area airports. Drones have been banned, and police estimate they are intercepting six per day, most by unknowing tourists.

France’s interior minister said more than 4,000 Olympic credentials have been rejected on suspicion of being foreign spies or having radical Islamist ties. On Tuesday, authorities raided the Paris apartment of a 40-year-old, Russian-born chef, alleging he was “conducting intelligence work on behalf of a foreign power … to provoke hostilities in France” through a large-scale attack during the Games.

There also was a YouTube video posted this week of a masked person claiming Hamas would turn Paris into “rivers of blood” in retaliation for France’s support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has since questioned its validity.

“We’re not sure,” Attal told media, “but it looks like it is fake and has been spread by pro-Kremlin and pro-Russian channels.”

Simone Biles trains on the uneven bars with the U.S. women’s gymnastics team Thursday, July 25, 2024, at Bercy Arena before the Paris Olympics. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

The other fear is a crippling Russian-backed cyberattack on Games-related computer systems. The Russian team has been banned from the Olympics as punishment for the invasion of Ukraine, although some individual Russian athletes are allowed to compete independently with no national association.

All this plays out amid the backdrop of political instability in France. Macron dissolved the National Assembly last month and called for snap elections, with no party receiving a majority of seats to form a new government without creating a coalition. Attal has resigned but agreed to stay on through the Games operating a government without the power to pass laws.

But the Games must go on. They always do.

The hope is the athletes come to the rescue and provide the ultimate diversion: Simone Biles in gymnastics, Katie Ledecky in the pool, LeBron James on the basketball court, 400-meter hurdler Sydney McLauglin-Levrone on the track, along with French stars like swimmer Leon Marchand, rugby player Antoine Dupont and 7-foot-4 NBA rookie Victor Wembayama.

The $10 billion budget, thanks to strong ticket sales and only a handful of new venues, so far is manageable. The Olympic rings hang majestically from the Eiffel Tower. Pollution levels in the Seine remain low. The famed Gallic indifference of Parisians appears to be waning. The opening ceremony dancers called off a threatened strike after receiving a new pay offer.

There are reports that Celine Dion and Lady Gaga will partner on a duet of a 1940s song by French singer Edith Piaf, “La Vie en rose.”

A rough translation: Life in rosy hues.

3M Co. shares soared Friday after raising its full-year profit forecast as its new chief executive officer vowed to reinvigorate the iconic manufacturer’s innovation engine.

William Brown

The shares were up nearly 20% as of midday Friday. The gains came after the Maplewood-based maker of Post-it notes and industrial and consumer products said adjusted earnings this year would be between $7 to $7.30 per share as it reported second-quarter results. That boosted the midpoint of 3M’s forecast to $7.15, up a dime from its previous outlook.

The results are the first under CEO Bill Brown, who succeeded Mike Roman on May 1. Brown inherited a much smaller company following the spinoff of 3M’s huge health care products division unit amid massive legal liabilities.

Brown kicked off his first earnings call by stressing the need to accelerate 3M’s sales growth. To get there, he wants to increase the pace of new product development.

Revenue from new products has steadily declined over the past decade as 3M shifted spending and focus to other needs, such as exiting its “forever chemicals” business and revamping its complex supply chain, Brown said. And although 3M has identified sectors such as electric cars and semiconductors as key sources of growth, “these efforts aren’t material enough today to offset erosion in our core,” he said.

“The simple fact is our products are aging” in 3M’s core businesses, he said.

He also plans to reduce the organization’s complexity. For example, a Command strip passes through five factories and two distribution centers before it gets to the customer, he said.

“We’ll take a fresh look at what cost is embedded in that complexity,” Brown said in an interview. The aerospace veteran was named to the top job in March.

Adding to the company’s challenges is that it’s also looking for a new chief financial officer after announcing earlier this month that Monish Patolawala would depart for Archer-Daniels-Midland Co.

Adjusted earnings were $1.93 a share for the second quarter. Analysts on average expected $1.68 a share, but it wasn’t immediately clear if their estimates are comparable to the company’s number. Net sales were $6.26 billion, outpacing Wall Street’s expectations.

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Jack Dolan | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — The world’s “heaviest wave” is born near the South Pole, where fierce storms pound the ocean’s surface like angry fists, sending pulses of energy racing north, unimpeded, for thousands of miles.

That force is all but invisible until it suddenly rides up a steep, smooth ramp on the ocean floor, curls into a spectacular barrel — more like a slab of concrete than water — and slams, with astonishing fury, into a razor-sharp coral reef on the southern tip of Tahiti.

Locals call the wave Teahupo’o, which loosely translates to “wall of skulls.” It has fascinated and terrified the world’s elite ocean athletes since it was first surfed in the 1980s.

In the coming days, Teahupo’o (pronounced “cho-poo”), just offshore of its namesake fishing village on the island’s lush coast, will become the site of the second Olympic surfing tournament. Holding the event nearly 10,000 miles from the epicenter of the Summer Games in Paris is a bold choice that has some safety-conscious experts shaking their heads and ghoulish spectators licking their chops.

Anyone who times their ride wrong, takes off in anything but the perfect spot or fails to paddle hard enough to match the speed of the wave, runs the risk of getting pounded into the coral reef below by all that rushing water: Imagine being shoved across a cheese grater by a steam roller.

At least five surfers have been killed on Teahupo’o; countless others have suffered broken bones and shredded flesh.

There have already been some spectacular wipeouts in Olympic warm-up sessions, but so far no serious injuries.

“It’s amazing just to see what this world can make, what the ocean is capable of,” said Crosby Colapinto, 23, a professional surfer from San Clemente who has competed at Teahupo’o. “It was so big when we did it, so scary,” he said last week, surveying the much gentler swell at his home beach. “It’s a wave that can mess you up pretty bad.”

Colapinto’s older brother, Griffin, is among the five U.S. surfers competing in the Paris Games. He and team member Caroline Marks live in San Clemente. A third member, Caitlin Simmers, lives just down the road in Oceanside — making the storied stretches of sand on either side of Camp Pendleton the cradle of America’s hopes for surfing glory this year.

San Clemente has long been at the center of competitive surf culture. Home to USA Surfing, the national governing body for the sport, Surfer Magazine and countless gear manufacturers, the quiet Orange County town drenched in sunshine and dotted with red-tile roofs pumps out world-class surfers the way Lake Tahoe and Mammoth produce elite skiers.

Much of that is due to the spectacular point break at Lower Trestles, or “Lowers,” which produces magnificent chest-to-head-high waves that break both ways, left and right, all summer long.

They’re ideal for practicing the flashy technical moves — slashing cutbacks, jaw-dropping aerials — that impress judges and help surfers rack up points in competitions that are scored much like gymnastics or figure skating.

But when San Clemente surfers get to Teahupo’o, many of those hard-won skills will go out the window.

“If Lowers is figure skating, Teahupo’o is hockey,” said Surfer Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Howard.

Local surf coach Lucas Taub, who was standing on the beach with a telescope last week, scoring the rides of his students on waves about a hundred yards from shore, took it a step further.

“The type of surfing you’re going to see at Teahupo’o is pretty much the opposite of what you’re going to see here,” Taub said. “Here, it’s about high-performance moves,” strung together with speed and grace. “Over there, it’s kind of like life or death.”

Incorporating surfing into the Olympics has been a dream more than a century in the making. Duke Kahanamoku, the legendary Hawaiian athlete who won five Olympic medals as a swimmer from 1912 through 1924, was one of the first and most passionate proponents of introducing his true love — surfing — to the Games.

But there has been fierce resistance along the way, particularly from some fellow surfers who think the whole idea of turning an intimate, almost zen-like communion with nature into a competition is sacrilege.

Then there are the logistical problems: The ocean is fickle. Peter Neushul, co-author of “The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing,” tells the story of how one of the big TV networks showed up decades ago on the north shore of Oahu with lots of expensive equipment, ready to broadcast a competition at Pipeline, another heavy wave that explodes just off the beach in easy camera range.

But on the appointed weekend, the waves never materialized.

So all the TV big shots were stuck sitting there, “daiquiris in hand, but nothing to televise,” Neushul said. “The networks just couldn’t operate like that,” so surfing struggled to reach the mainstream.

But these days, many of the traditional Olympic sports are beginning to feel passe to a younger generation. (When was the last time you went artistic swimming with your buddies, or the kids tossed a shot put around the backyard?) So organizers have been searching for ways to make the Games more relevant by including sports that many people do for fun.

This year, mountain biking, sport climbing and surfing are all Olympic sports.

Surfing’s debut came in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. The competition was held at the closest reliable surf break to the city, Shidashita Beach. Situated on the east coast of Japan, “Shida” as it’s known, suffers from the same problem afflicting East Coast beaches in the U.S. — generally small and uninspiring surf.

Waves are created by wind, and global winds generally blow toward west-facing beaches, pushing big waves onto them.

So there was real concern in the international surfing community that the Tokyo tournament could be a bust, conjuring comparisons to a memorable competition in Florida where organizers raced boats up and down the shoreline, hoping to create a tiny wake for the competitors to ride, said Peter Westwick, a USC historian and co-author of “The World in the Curl.”

But luck was on the Tokyo organizers’ side. The waves arrived, and the competition went well, favoring the more technical riders.

French organizers are taking a dramatically different approach. Instead of holding the competition on one of their many west-facing Atlantic Ocean beaches in Europe, they decided to go to French Polynesia, where the promise of a breathtaking competition awaits.

Unlike the sports with fixed dates, the surfing competition is set to run for four days between July 27 and Aug. 5, whenever conditions look most promising.

If Teahupo’o cooperates, the result will be “incredible eye candy” for viewers at home, Neushul said.

Most of the competitors will have some experience at Teahupo’o. It’s a regular stop on the professional World Surf League circuit. But locals who surf there all the time, and Americans such as John John Florence, who grew up surfing huge waves at Pipeline, should have a distinct advantage, Neushul said.

The risk is that the wave will get too big for some of the less-experienced competitors to handle safely. At that point, instead of being a showcase for technical ability, it will be a competition to see who has the steely nerves and precise timing required to launch themselves down the steep drop into the barrel and come out the other side alive.

“I would hate to see someone get their head bashed in on the reef,” because they were afraid to admit the wave was too big for them, Neushul said.

During a brief interview last week at his farewell party in San Clemente, before boarding the plane for Tahiti, Griffin Colapinto agreed the competition ahead could “be super dangerous” for some people.

“If it’s big,” he said, “you’re just going to have to put it all on the line.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.