Eye on the Prize: Three Star Athletes On the Winding Road to Tokyo

Don’t forget: Even though they are poised to take place in 2021, the Olympics that we’ve all been waiting for are still the 2020 Olympics. From the perspectives of the athletes, it’s as if they’ve been at the starting blocks all along, waiting to burst out, to dive or mount, throw or take one long last leap. From the point of view of everybody else, the notion of athletes returning feels like that next moment in a relay, when a baton from life before the pandemic gets passed on to a runner after, the teams joyfully picking up speed in a new world—and, somehow, speeding us along with them.

Sure, logistics are always changing, with health precautions like so many crucial hurdles, but the anticipation is building, with more competitions and the return of qualifying meets. “Me, personally, I am somebody who loves to be social,” says Noah Lyles. America’s 200-meter sprinting star has already won in New York and surged ahead late—his trademark—to win at the USATF Golden Games in California. “I love to go out and hang out—and practice—with other people. I love it! To train with others and get that excitement, that…edge!”

As was the case for everything else, the schedule for the 2020 Olympics did not go as planned. At the beginning of March 2020, Simone Manuel, who won two gold and two silver medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics and was planning on continuing her streak in Tokyo, had just finished up a swim meet in Des Moines while talking to her mom. Rumors about the virus were flying. “My mom was saying, ‘Should you be taking pictures with fans? Should you be signing autographs?’ ” Manuel, 24, recalls. Three days after she got back to her home in California, the pool she trained in closed up, the 2020 games still theoretically on. “And nobody had a plan,” she says.

A gymnastics version of that happened to 18-year-old Sunisa Lee, who goes by Suni. A veteran of the U.S. team that won the gold at the 2019 world championships in Stuttgart, Germany, Lee was practicing her uneven-bar magic at her gym in the suburbs of St. Paul one day and doing Zoom workouts at home the next. Time stood still—until it didn’t. “It’s crazy how fast the time has gone,” she says.

One by one, athletes everywhere concocted new ways to train or resurrected old ones. In Florida, Lyles worked out on grass and on weekends took up roller-skating—a hobby that initially shocked his trainers, until they saw that it was less about speed and more about a vibe. “I figured out that a bunch of my friends, like, love to roller-skate. I actually got pretty decent.” Lee started running with her teammates, outdoors, and cooking with her mom, indoors. “It’s just so much healthier,” she says. (She reports, also, that it tasted great.) Thanks to her coach, Manuel managed to find a backyard pool seemingly designed for her needs: two lanes, with poolside race clocks and starting blocks. “You’re in California, and you have really big swim and water-polo fans, so everybody has these massive pools,” she says. Was she surprised at such a made-for-closed-swim-centers setup? “Yes,” she says, “but at the same time, if this were to be anywhere, it would be in California!”

The pool’s owners donated its daily use to Manuel and her former Stanford teammate Katie Ledecky, but the initial rush of fortunate feelings gave way to more complicated emotions in the shut-down world. “Sometimes I felt a little guilty,” Manuel recalls. “It was hard doing it knowing that the Olympics were postponed. You go through these roller-coaster emotions—you’re thinking, Ah, it’s another year to get better, and the next you’re like, But I was ready for it right now.” She did her best to keep things in perspective, but like everyone, she missed the least extraordinary things, like a trip to the mall or to the nail salon—and if you follow her on In­­stagram, you already know that she is not fooling about her nails, a tiny detail that makes her photo finishes even more impressive. Fortunately, swimming is a kind of therapy for her, but Zooming with her mother and father in Texas did not replace hugging them. “I went on walks, and I’m not a walker!” Did she turn into one? She breaks into laughter. “No!”

Perspective reminds us that, for better or worse, perseverance is in the definition of an Olympic athlete, and for these games, perseverance is being tested, only more. Lyles and his brother, Josephus, who is also a professional sprinter, played just about every sport growing up, but it was during the USATF National Junior Olympic Championships, when Noah lost during the high-jump finals, that his mother, Keisha Caine Bishop—herself a standout runner—saw the 12-year-old transforming into a champion. “After he lost, he came over to me,” Bishop recalls, “and I said, ‘Hey, Noah—how’re you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m great.’ I said, ‘Are you disappointed that you didn’t win?’ He said, ‘Nope, I’m good—I’ll come back next year.’ ” It doesn’t hurt that Lyles has an Olympian’s physical mechanics (in stride frequency and length) or that he (like Lee and Manuel) is a student of his sport. “You hear this a lot,” says his coach, Lance Brauman, “but he is built to run.”

The first Olympics that amazed him were the 2012 London games, when he was 15 and mostly watched gymnastics. “I just thought Gabby Douglas was the coolest person because, one, she was young,” Lyles says. “Two, she was Black, and three, she was the first to do something.” (She was the first Black woman to win the Olympic all-around gymnastics title.) “I just thought, Yeah—I want to go out there and be somebody who’s the first to do something. The Olympics hits everybody.” He also wants to entertain, his race plan so closely mind-mapped that his way of keeping cool is putting on a show for the cameras—a Usain Bolt–like tendency that Bolt himself has noticed, along with Lyles’s speed. (“He looks like he wants to do great things,” Bolt told USA Today this spring.) It’s a pre-race strategy that Lyles compares to that of a lion, which rests by day but comes out strong when it’s time to attack and amaze. Forgoing a mane, Lyles was recently spotted wearing a leopard-and-camo-print running suit—and, as always, entertaining socks. “I’m heavily into fashion,” he says, “and it’s funny, because in my high school years, all I wanted to do was run, so I very much didn’t care about how I looked. I basically dressed like a dad—a non-cool dad.”

“I want to go out there and be somebody who’s the first to do something,” says Lyles, who was inspired as a kid by gymnast Gabby Douglas. “The Olympics hits everybody”

As a young girl, Lee was always grabbing her mom’s phone to watch gymnasts flip, then repairing to the nearest couch or bed to try one out. Her father spotted her in those days and then, as her gymnastics improved, organized fundraisers at local Hmong restaurants to help pay for travel to national and then international meets, coaxing Lee to sing, which she loved. “My dad would pick some songs,” she remembers, “and I’d say, ‘What is this song?’ ” (Once it was Bette Midler’s version of “Wind Beneath My Wings.”) The Twin Cities area is home to the largest urban Hmong community in the U.S., and when Lee wins, she is winning for the Hmong neighbors who supported her in the gym and supported her father: While helping a friend, he fell off a ladder, suffering a spinal-cord injury that paralyzed him from the chest down a few days before Lee won a gold, a silver, and a bronze medal at the national championships in 2019. Her father FaceTimed Lee at the nationals from his hospital bed to cheer her on, but no one knew what she was going through as she attempted a bar routine that she had upgraded in difficulty. As she aced the landing, the commentators predicted Tokyo gold.

The very sound of water would cause Simone Manuel fits of joy as a child—she laughs as she remembers fierce attempts to fling herself into the tub, anybody’s tub, whether undressed for it or not. “Whenever I heard the water running, I would just get super excited, kind of like when a dog is ready for a walk,” she jokes. Her older brothers were on the swim team, and after watching them she announced to her parents she could swim. She wasn’t kidding. “Why is Simone not doing what the others are doing?” her mother asked the instructor when she spotted her daughter swimming across the pool on day two of lessons. “Why isn’t she…floating?” The response: “Some kids are just ready to swim.” Her brothers can still beat her—but not because they’re faster. “Their technique is so terrible, and then I’m laughing and choking on water so much that they win,” Manuel says, “but it’s okay.”

After she finished Stanford, where she studied communications and African and African American studies, 2020 was to be Manuel’s year to concentrate on the Olympics, with summertime the final lap of four years of prep. The summer, of course, marked the beginning of historic mass uprisings, and as the first Black woman to win an individual medal in Olympic swimming, she was acutely aware of the swimming pool as a historic site of racial contest in modern American history: The pool was like the lunch counter at the start of the Civil Rights movement, when, for instance, acid was poured in a pool in the vicinity of Black bathers. Later, as suburbs expanded and cities continued to segregate, the ability to swim marked both access and privilege, as it does today. (The percentage of Black members in USA Swimming is, by their own accounting, somewhere in the single digits.) Immediately following her wins at Rio, Manuel was on MSNBC encouraging Black children in the U.S. with little or no swimming ability—69 percent—to learn. (“You can do it,” she said, still standing poolside.) Later she noted that, according to the CDC’s last study, in 2014, Black children are 5.5 times more likely to drown in swimming pools. Television announcers throughout her ascent in the sport tended to describe Manuel as “coming out of nowhere,” when she was there—usually, after the finish, on a podium—all along. In her own telling, it’s a bias she has felt viscerally—and while once she might have talked less about her own experiences, she’s now ready to share more, for her own sake and the sake of others. “When you are telling other people what you’re feeling,” she says, “you never know who you affect—you could be helping them through the same storm.”

When I talked with the athletes as the summer was about to begin, Manuel had been to a meet and remembered all the things you forget—hotels, logistics—and had just returned from a three-week rest. She’d gone back to Sugar Land, Texas, her hometown, to binge-watch Good Girls (“They’re not good girls!”) and savor Shipley’s glazed doughnuts (“a pillow of goodness”). Lyles had just begun to run 200s again too, and watching him come out of the first turn was like watching someone turn on a jet pack, an explosive speed he describes like a physicist: “When you come out to the straightaway, if you stay in the middle or come even closer to the inside of the lane, you will actually take all that speed that you built up, and it will force you out.”

Suni Lee had just aced the bars at a meet in Indianapolis, a 10-hour drive with her teammates to an event that was spectator-less but televised—a strange and pressure-making combination—and her coach was raving. “She really puts everything into it—not just the gymnastics but to be everything she can be,” says Jess Graba. She came with a new bar routine and, as per her custom, spoke to nobody beforehand but at last, when she landed, broke open a huge, winning smile. After all, she had left the earth, launching into her Nabieva—the technical term for when, to the layperson, she is soaring like a bird. “I am literally flying over the bar and catching it,” Lee says. “It feels so cool.”

Originally Appeared on Vogue