When Suni Lee won the 2025 ESPY for best comeback athlete Wednesday night, she made sure to recognize a select group of people, including one of the doctors who she said stood by her side after she was diagnosed with two rare kidney diseases a few years ago.
"To Dr. Marcia Faustin, she's actually here in the crowd with me today," Lee said in part in her award acceptance speech as the audience applauded. "Thank you for guiding me through the toughest moments, reading every scan and report by my side."
Faustin, who attended this year's ESPYS with Lee, is a family medicine and sports medicine doctor and an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, Davis. She serves as the co-head team physician for UC Davis Division I intercollegiate athletics and the USA Gymnastics women's national team.
Faustin also accompanied the U.S. women's gymnastics team to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the 2024 Paris Olympics, where Lee earned one gold, one silver, and one bronze medal and another gold and two more bronze medals, respectively.
Lee has opened up about having two rare kidney diseases, penning a personal essay for Women's Health about the topic in March 2025.
Olympian Suni Lee says there's more to her than gymnastics"Before I got sick, I didn't really know anything about kidney disease other than that it was a serious illness. It never occurred to me that it could happen to someone my age or someone as healthy and fit as I was," the 22-year-old wrote at the time.
"Kidney disease cannot be cured," she added. "One of the hardest parts about living with kidney disease is knowing that I will have it for my whole life. It will never go away, and I have to face the fact that I will never be the same Suni I was before everything happened. But kidney disease can be treated, especially if you get an accurate diagnosis."
