In October 2025, during the week of the World Gymnastics Championships in Jakarta, Leanne Wong did two things that don't usually happen in the same week, let alone the same day. She won the silver medal in the all-around, finishing a tenth of a point behind Russia's Angelina Melnikova. And she sat for a biochemistry exam.
Neither was a fluke. Wong, who turns 23 this September, has spent the better part of a decade refusing to treat any one part of her life as the fallback for another. She is a five-time world championship medalist, one of only 15 women in NCAA history to complete a "Gym Slam," the founder and CEO of a gymnastics apparel business that has expanded into coffee and real estate, and a pre-med graduate student a few steps from applying to medical school. None of it is a hedge against the others failing. Each track has simply been the plan.
An Elite Career
Wong's rise began at Great American Gymnastics Express in the Kansas City area, where coaches Al Fong and Armine Barutyan helped turn a national junior champion into a senior standout almost immediately. She won the 2019 American Cup in her senior debut and helped the U.S. win team gold at that year's Pan American Games.
Then came the part of the story that would have discouraged a less stubborn competitor. Wong qualified as a traveling alternate for the Tokyo Olympics, only to spend much of the trip quarantined alone in a hotel room after a fellow alternate tested positive for COVID-19. She never competed. Three years later, at the Paris Olympic Trials, she again finished seventh in the all-around and again qualified only as an alternate.
In the years between and after those disappointments, Wong quietly built one of the more decorated résumés in the sport. She won all-around silver and floor bronze at the 2021 World Championships, then helped the U.S. capture consecutive team golds in 2022 and 2023. Last fall in Jakarta, she added a second all-around silver, extending a streak in which an American woman has won an all-around medal at every world championships or Olympics dating back to 2003. It was her fifth world medal and her fourth straight trip to a World Championships team.
NCAA Legacy
Wong signed with the University of Florida in 2020 and debuted for the Gators in January 2022, training elite routines on the side in nearly every season she competed collegiately. By her junior year, she had scored a 10.0 on all four events over the course of her career—a "Gym Slam" achieved by only 14 other gymnasts in NCAA history—capping it with a perfect floor score against LSU.
She won her first individual NCAA title on uneven bars in 2024 and added all-around and vault runner-up finishes the same year. Florida won three SEC championships during her time in the program, and she repeatedly earned All-America honors and a place on the SEC Academic Honor Roll, finishing her senior season with five regular-season All-America selections, a total matched by only three other gymnasts nationally.
Business Ventures
The entrepreneurial side started almost by accident. In a high school fashion and interior design elective in 2018, Wong sewed her first hair bow. It became part of her competition look, then a brand: Leanne Wong Bowtique, which she formally founded in December 2021 and has run as CEO ever since, collaborating with leotard and apparel companies while building a product recognizable across the sport.
A second venture followed in a similarly offhand way—after months of making strong coffee for Florida's gymnastics staff, coffee unofficially rated the "Strongest Coffee in Gainesville," a half-joke about opening a shop turned into the Leanne Wong Sip Shop. She also runs a charitable foundation, and in early 2026 she passed Florida's real estate licensing exam on her first attempt, adding property work to an already full plate.
Path to Medicine
Medicine has been the constant underneath all of it. Wong's parents, Marco Wong and Bee Ding, are research scientists who run clinical drug trials, and her father and grandfather both hold MDs. "I've always dreamed of becoming a medical doctor," she has said of growing up around that work, and she has stayed on the pre-med track through every season of competition since—fitting in MCAT preparation, a memoir titled My Journey: Trust the Process published in March 2024, and now a graduate degree around an Olympic-caliber training schedule.
She graduated magna cum laude in May 2025 with a bachelor's degree in Health Education and Behavior, then returned for a master's in the same field, finishing this spring as her program's commencement speaker. She is one of only five members of the U.S. Senior National Team since 1972 to hold a bachelor's degree while still competing internationally. Asked whether medical school might finally pull her away from the sport for good, she's left the door open rather than closed it: "Med school is always going to be there."
More to Come
With her NCAA eligibility used up, Wong has stayed at Florida this year as a student assistant coach, mentoring the Gators' younger gymnasts while finishing her graduate coursework. She's also kept competing, and the Jakarta medal has people in the sport wondering aloud whether a third Olympic cycle—and a first real shot at competing, not just traveling, at the Los Angeles Games in 2028—might be next.
Whatever she decides, the throughline of Wong's career so far is that she has never needed one part of her life to save her from another. The bows, the coffee, the real estate license, and the medical degree in progress weren't built to catch her if gymnastics didn't work out. They were built because she wanted all of it, at the same time, on purpose.
