Who Is Suni Lee Dating? Everything We Know About Her Love Life in 2026

Who Is Suni Lee Dating Right Now?

As of 2026, Suni Lee does not have a publicly confirmed boyfriend. That is the short, honest answer - and it has been the answer for several years now. Unlike many athletes whose relationships play out across social media, Lee has drawn a firm line around her personal life, and neither she nor anyone in her camp has introduced a partner, confirmed a romance, or even hinted at one in interviews. The curiosity is understandable: she is one of the most recognizable gymnasts on the planet, a six-time Olympic medalist with a massive following, and she is regularly photographed at high-profile sporting events. But visibility is not the same as confirmation, and Lee has been disciplined about keeping the two separate.

The most recent test of that discipline came in the summer of 2025, when Lee became a fixture at New York Knicks games at Madison Square Garden. Cameras repeatedly caught her chatting and laughing courtside with Knicks forward OG Anunoby, particularly on nights when he played well, and social media quickly decided the two were an item. Lee shut it down herself. Speaking to Mirror US in July 2025, she explained that the whole thing started as a joke that social media took further than it should have: they are just friends. She added that she is close with a number of people around the Knicks - including Karl-Anthony Towns and his partner Jordyn Woods, whom she has known since her Minnesota days - and that she simply enjoys watching basketball. There is nothing there, she said, and she fully supports the team. That remains the status quo in 2026: no confirmed partner, no public romance, and a gymnast who would rather talk about her sport.

It is worth being precise about what is not known versus what is merely rumored. In the past two years, Lee has also been linked in passing to Houston Rockets star Kevin Durant and Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker - the Booker chatter started from a viral photo of the two during the Paris Olympics. None of those rumors was ever confirmed by Lee or by anyone credible around her, and they belong firmly in the unconfirmed category. When Lee wants the public to know something about her love life, recent history suggests she will say so directly, as she did with the Anunoby denial. Until then, the accurate reporting is that she is single in the only sense that matters publicly: nothing confirmed.

Suni Lee and Jaylin Smith: Her Confirmed Past Relationship

The one relationship Suni Lee has publicly acknowledged was with Jaylin Smith, a cornerback for the USC Trojans football team. The pairing came to light in December 2021, when Lee - then 18 and fresh off her Olympic all-around triumph in Tokyo - shared photos of herself with Smith on Instagram. It was a brief, bright window into her personal life, and it closed almost as quickly as it opened. The photos were soon deleted, and Lee later explained why: she had been hit with a wave of backlash, including from parts of the Hmong community, over dating a Black man.

Lee spoke about the experience with unusual openness. In comments reported by Today, she described receiving hate for the interracial relationship, saying the reaction had been painful at an age when she was still a teenager navigating sudden global fame. People magazine also covered the backlash at the time, noting the criticism she faced for her choice of partner. The episode was a harsh early lesson in what public dating costs, and it appears to have shaped everything about how she has handled her private life since. She never again posted a partner on social media, and she has never publicly confirmed another relationship.

As for Smith, he was a legitimate college football prospect in his own right - a highly recruited defensive back out of Bishop Alemany High School in California who had even appeared as a standout youth player on the Netflix series Coach Snoop, built around rapper Snoop Dogg and his youth football league. By the time of the 2024 Paris Olympics, Sporting News was still describing Smith as her reported boyfriend while noting that the two had revealed little about the relationship and that it was unclear whether they were even still together. In the years since, neither has said anything to clarify the current state of things, and all available evidence points to the relationship having ended quietly and privately - which, given how the public announcement went, is entirely consistent with how Lee now operates.

The OG Anunoby Dating Rumors, Denied

If there was a defining dating rumor of Suni Lee in 2025, it was OG Anunoby. The story had all the classic ingredients: a star athlete repeatedly spotted at Madison Square Garden during the Knicks playoff push - their first deep run since 2000 - chatting courtside with one of the teams best players, exchanging smiles, posing for photos. Fans connected the dots the way fans do, and the idea that the Olympic gymnast was the Knicks forwards good-luck charm took on a life of its own across social media.

Lee addressed it head-on. In an interview with Mirror US during the summer of 2025, she said the speculation had started as a joke and that social media had taken it further than it ever deserved to go. She and Anunoby are just friends, she said - she is genuinely close with several people in the Knicks orbit, including Karl-Anthony Towns, whom she knew back in Minnesota before his trade to New York, and Towns partner Jordyn Woods. She goes to the games because she loves basketball, not because she is dating someone on the roster. There is nothing there, she said plainly, and she fully supports all of them and the Knicks. Outlets covering the denial noted that there was almost no sign of Anunoby having any public dating history at all, which made the rumor feel even more like a case of proximity being mistaken for romance.

The denial matters because it is the clearest on-the-record statement Lee has made about her love life in years, and it fits the broader pattern: she corrects the record when rumors get loud, and otherwise says nothing. As of 2026, nothing has emerged to contradict her - no new sightings with Anunoby, no soft launch, no follow-up. The rumor is closed, by her own account.

Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, and Other Unconfirmed Rumors

Beyond Anunoby, two more NBA names have drifted through the Suni Lee rumor mill, and both deserve the same honest label: unconfirmed, and best treated as such. In 2024, whispers linked Lee to Houston Rockets star Kevin Durant. The rumors never attached to anything concrete - no photos together, no mutual acknowledgment, no credible reporting - and they faded as quickly as they surfaced. During the Paris Olympics that same year, a viral photo of Lee with Phoenix Suns guard Devin Booker set off a fresh round of speculation. Again, there was nothing behind the image beyond two American Olympians in the same place at the same time.

It is worth pausing on why these rumors keep attaching to Lee specifically. She occupies a unique cultural position: a young, famous, photogenic Olympian who is frequently visible at NBA games and Olympic-adjacent events, but who reveals almost nothing about her private life. That combination - high visibility plus low information - is rocket fuel for speculation, because every courtside conversation becomes a blank screen onto which fans project a romance. Lee herself diagnosed the dynamic when she noted how a joke about Anunoby got taken further than it should have. The responsible way to cover her dating life, given that dynamic, is to separate what she has confirmed (the Smith relationship, now over), what she has denied (Anunoby), and everything else (unconfirmed noise).

There is also a quieter possibility that rarely gets discussed in the rumor churn: that Lee is simply not dating anyone seriously right now, by choice. Between her training demands, her health challenges, and the well-documented ugliness that followed her one public relationship, a period of deliberate privacy would be the most unsurprising thing in the world. Nothing in the public record contradicts it.

Who Is Suni Lee? A Career Snapshot

To understand why the interest in her personal life runs so high, it helps to remember just how much Sunisa Lee - born March 9, 2003, in Saint Paul, Minnesota - has already accomplished by 23. She is the 2020 Olympic all-around champion, the first Hmong-American Olympian and the first Asian American woman to win the Olympic all-around title. In Tokyo she also took team silver and uneven bars bronze; in Paris 2024 she added three more medals - team gold, all-around bronze, and uneven bars bronze - bringing her Olympic medal total to six. She competed collegiately for the Auburn Tigers and won an NCAA championship on balance beam.

Her road back to Paris was anything but smooth. In 2023, Lee revealed that she was battling kidney disease, a diagnosis that disrupted her training, forced her to step back from competition, and at one point put her gymnastics future in genuine doubt. That she fought through it to medal three times in Paris is one of the defining stories of those Games - and it helps explain her current posture toward fame. An athlete who has been through a serious health scare tends to guard her energy carefully, and Lee has clearly decided that her romantic life is not public property.

Off the apparatus, she remains one of the most marketable gymnasts in the world, with major brand partnerships and a social media presence that keeps her in the public eye even between competitions. That visibility is precisely why the dating questions never stop - and why her consistent answer, privacy, deserves to be reported as the fact it is.

What Is Next for Suni Lee

As of October 2026, the honest outlook on Suni Lee and dating is that there is no outlook to report - and that is, in its own way, the story. She has not introduced a partner, confirmed a relationship, or signaled that one is on the horizon. Her public energy remains directed at gymnastics, brand work, and the occasional courtside appearance at Knicks games, where she will no doubt continue to be photographed chatting with players and continue to be romantically linked to them by hopeful fans.

What would change the picture? Only Lee herself. Her history shows a clear pattern: when she had something to share, she shared it (the December 2021 Instagram post with Jaylin Smith), and when rumors outrun reality, she corrects them (the July 2025 Anunoby denial). She does not feed the rumor mill, and she does not perform her private life for content. If that changes - if a new partner appears on her Instagram the way Smith once did - it will be news precisely because she made it so.

Until then, the accurate summary stands: Suni Lee is single as far as the public record shows in 2026, her one confirmed relationship is years in the past, her most recent rumor was personally denied, and everything else is speculation she has given no reason to credit. In an era of constant oversharing, there is something almost old-fashioned - and worth respecting - about an athlete who simply declines to make her love life part of the show.

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