Suni Lee, the Olympic gold medalist gymnast, has been diagnosed with two rare, incurable kidney diseases. She has not publicly shared the specific names of her diagnoses because her medical team has indicated the diagnoses may evolve as they learn more about her condition. What is known is that her particular form of kidney disease is uncommon, even though chronic kidney disease in general affects millions of people.
How Her Symptoms Started
Lee first noticed something was wrong in February 2023, when she woke up one morning with swollen ankles. At first, she assumed the swelling came from the demands of elite gymnastics training. But by the next morning, her entire body was swollen, including her face, legs, and hands. The swelling kept getting worse.
Over a short period, Lee gained roughly 40 pounds from fluid retention. Her body was holding onto water in a way that made it impossible to train normally, let alone perform flips and landings. She also had difficulty urinating, which prompted her doctor to order additional testing. A kidney biopsy eventually confirmed that she had a rare kidney condition, and further evaluation revealed she actually had two separate forms of kidney disease.
Why the Diagnosis Hasn’t Been Named
Lee has deliberately kept the specific diagnoses private. She told Self magazine that the names may change as her doctors continue to study her case, which is not unusual with complex kidney conditions. Some kidney diseases are classified based on biopsy findings that can be reinterpreted over time, especially when a patient has more than one condition affecting the kidneys simultaneously. What Lee has confirmed is that both conditions are incurable, meaning they can be managed but not eliminated.
How It Affected Her Gymnastics Career
The physical toll was immediate and severe. With her body retaining so much water, Lee could not perform basic gymnastics skills. Flipping, twisting, and absorbing the impact of landings all became impossible at 40 pounds above her normal weight. For an athlete competing at the highest level in a sport where fractions of a second and millimeters of positioning matter, the change was devastating.
Lee managed to return to competition gradually, working on the days when her symptoms allowed it and resting when they didn’t. She described the process as taking advantage of good days to get training done while accepting that many days simply would not cooperate. She earned a bronze medal on balance beam at the U.S. national championships in August 2023, a notable achievement given her condition. She received an invitation to the World Championships trials but turned it down, choosing instead to end her season early and rest.
Her diet changed as well. Lee adopted a lower-sodium eating plan to help control fluid retention, one of the most common lifestyle adjustments for people managing kidney disease. Reducing sodium helps the body hold onto less excess water, which in Lee’s case directly affected her ability to move and compete.
Her Path to the 2024 Olympics
Despite both diagnoses being permanent, Lee set her sights on the 2024 Paris Olympics. Her coaches had no prior experience managing an athlete with two kidney diseases, which meant the entire team was navigating unfamiliar territory. Lee was open about the mental health toll of the experience as well, describing the impact on her personal life and her self-image as her body changed in ways she could not control.
Lee made the 2024 U.S. Olympic team and competed in Paris, a comeback that carried additional weight given everything she had been through in the 18 months prior. Her situation highlighted something many people with chronic kidney disease face: the condition is invisible on most days, but its effects on energy, fluid balance, and daily functioning are constant. For Lee, those effects played out on one of the world’s biggest athletic stages.
What Two Kidney Diseases Means in Practice
Having two separate kidney conditions simultaneously is rare and complicates both treatment and prediction. Each condition can affect the kidneys differently, whether by damaging the filtering units, causing inflammation, or allowing protein to leak into the urine. When two processes are happening at once, doctors have to balance management strategies that may sometimes conflict with each other.
For Lee, the most visible symptom has been fluid retention, which suggests her kidneys struggle to regulate how much water and salt the body keeps. This is a hallmark of several kidney diseases, particularly those that affect the kidney’s filtering membranes. The 40 pounds she gained was almost entirely water weight, not fat, which is why it accumulated so rapidly and affected her entire body at once. Managing this requires ongoing attention to diet, hydration, and in some cases medication to help the kidneys excrete excess fluid.
Lee’s willingness to discuss her condition publicly has brought attention to the reality that kidney disease can strike young, otherwise healthy people. It is not exclusively a disease of aging or diabetes, though those are the most common causes. Rare kidney conditions can appear in adolescence or early adulthood with little warning, and their management becomes a lifelong process of monitoring kidney function and adjusting treatment as the disease progresses.