Watch Suni Lee Crush a Wild New Gymnastics Skill No One’s Ever Landed in Competition Before
January 24, 2024
The 2024 Paris Olympics might still be six months away, but after scrolling through gold medalist Suni Lee’s Instagram yesterday, we can’t stop hoping that it would come just a little sooner.
On January 23, the 20-year-old Olympic gymnast posted a carousel of four short videos of her training. And they’re…pretty amazing. In each, Lee performs a release move from the uneven bars using a reverse grip, catches some serious air, flips, and then twists completely before catching the bar back overhand.
Lee casually dropped the videos uncaptioned, but Olympics.com filled in the blanks for us: The move, which has never been successfully performed before in a women’s gymnastics event, is called the full-twisting layout Jaeger. If Lee can land it in international competition—say, at the Paris Games—it’ll be forever known as the Lee. According to a video posted by Artistic Gymnastics, the Lee is a complete 360-degree version of the stretched Jaeger, which is known as the Cappuccitti (named after Canadian gymnast Stephanie Cappuccitti, who first landed that skill).
It’s such a difficult combo that even other top-of-the-game gymnasts were stunned. “I did this once…then I woke up,” LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne commented. “Are u even real!!! Amazing!!!” 2020 Olympian Mykayla Skinner wrote.
After coming home from the Tokyo Games with some serious hardware—all-around gold, team silver, and uneven bars bronze—Lee went on to compete for Auburn University. She guided her team to the final four of the 2022 NCAA Women’s Gymnastics Championships for the first time before developing a kidney condition in February of 2023. “I kept peeling off the bar. I couldn’t hold on,” Lee told SELF in an exclusive cover interview last fall. “My fingers were so swollen, and I couldn’t even do a normal kip cast to handstand on bars.” At the time, her doctors shut her down from training and she ended her sophomore season at Auburn early.
