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THE KELLY CLARKSON SHOW -- Episode 1035 -- Pictured: Suni Lee -- (Photo by: Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal)

Olympic gold medalist Suni Lee says she was pepper sprayed in racist attack

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“I was so mad, but there was nothing I could do,” Lee said of the incident.

Suni Lee, who made history at the Tokyo Olympics this summer as the first Asian American woman to earn a gold medal in the all-around gymnastics competition, said she was the victim of recent anti-Asian violence.

Lee, 18, said she was waiting for an Uber with friends, all of whom are of Asian descent, according to an interview with Lee published Wednesday in Pop Sugar. A car drove by, and people in it began shouting racist slurs and telling Lee and her friends to “go back where they come from,” the gymnast told Pop Sugar.

As the car sped off, one of the passengers pepper-sprayed Lee’s arm, she said.

Her representative confirmed the incident to NBC News in an email Thursday.

“I was so mad, but there was nothing I could do or control because they skirted off,” Lee told Pop Sugar. “I didn’t do anything to them, and having the reputation, it’s so hard because I didn’t want to do anything that could get me into trouble. I just let it happen.”

THE KELLY CLARKSON SHOW — Episode 1035 — Pictured: Suni Lee — (Photo by: Weiss Eubanks/NBCUniversal)

Lee, who grew up in a tight-knit Hmong community in St. Paul, Minnesota, vaulted onto the world stage after gold medalist Simone Biles withdrew from the Games for mental health reasons.

Lee became the fifth consecutive U.S. gymnast to earn gold in the all-around competition.

The kind of attack that Lee described is more common than previous reporting suggested, according to data published this year by Stop AAPI Hate, a non-profit group that tracks incidents of discrimination and hate against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The group documented 3,800 incidents between March 2020 and February 2021, up from 2,600 the year before.

Nearly 70 percent of people who reported being targeted were women.

Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University and a co-founder founder of Stop AAPI Hate, has said that the pandemic — along with widely reported episodes of violence aimed at Asian seniors — had likely prompted more people to report the kind of harassment they’d long endured.