With Russia’s women’s gymnastics team leading by more than a point and Simone Biles abruptly out of the competition in Tuesday’s team final, it fell to Sunisa Lee, anchoring the United States on the uneven bars, to keep the Americans’ gold medal hopes alive.
It was, Lee said afterward, “the most pressure I’ve ever felt in my life.”
It didn’t show.
The U.S. team, reeling from Biles’s withdrawal, already had two good routines in the bag, from Grace McCallum and Jordan Chiles, the latter of whom had not been scheduled to compete on bars at all and had to step in with minutes’ notice.