The gold medalist in Thursday’s Olympic gymnastics all-around competition is the daughter of a Cummins employee.
Suni Lee’s father John Lee is a Cummins Power Systems Product Engineer from Shoreview, Minnesota. Suni began gymnastics there at age 6.
“She was always jumping around on couches, and it was clear we needed to do something to channel that energy,” John said in a Cummins newsletter. “I remember the first time I took her to the gym, there were a lot of people there, girls doing flips. Suni said, ‘Oh they’re so good.’ She wanted to be just like them.”
“Suni made the team pretty quickly and she advanced so fast,” he added. “We never pushed her, but I built her a beam for the back yard. We would always go to competitions that were close by and even fly out to watch her compete. It was usually me who went to the competitions before my accident.”
John fell from a ladder while helping a friend trim a tree in August 2019 and was paralyzed from the chest down. After a long recovery, he returned to work in October 2020 as a Product Application Engineer.
