"Skills I trained but never competed"- Suni Lee shares glimpses of training the Cheng on the vault

A few weeks after the Paris Olympics, Suni Lee is back in the gym, and she's adding a new skill to her repertoire. While typically a specialist in the balance beam and uneven bars, the American was recently spotted training the Cheng on the vault, one of the hardest moves to perform in international gymnastics.

Lee has long since established herself as a proficient athlete on all four pieces of equipment, with her all-around gold in Tokyo proof of her versatility. However, the youngster’s strength has always been in her performances on the beam as well as the bars, and she's a two-time Olympic medalist and a World Championships bronze-medalist in the former event.

However, the Paris Olympics gold medalist is now stepping up her game on the vault, as seen in a video she shared on her Instagram stories. Suni Lee captioned the video of her performing the Cheng,

“Skills I trained but never competed dump. I was so excited about this.”

The Cheng is one of the hardest vaults to perform in women's gymnastics and is favored by many elite athletes when they gun for a podium finish at a major event such as the World Championships or the Olympic Games.

The move was first executed by Cheng Fei in 2006, when it was placed at a difficulty value of 6.50, and includes the gymnast performing a round-off onto the vaulting table and pushing off into a laid-out salto with one and a half twists. Since then the difficulty value for the vault has consistently lowered and is currently scored at a 5.60.

Suni Lee fails to get her eponymous skill at the Paris Olympics

Suni Lee failed to get her eponymous skill in 2024 (Source: Getty)

While 2024 has been one major success after the other for Suni Lee, the 21-year-old has so far been unable to get the one thing she's been pining for since the beginning of the year - an eponymous skill. Early this season, Lee shared a video of herself performing the full-twisting Jaeger on the uneven bars, a move that has never been performed before in international gymnastics.

The American intended to qualify for the Baku World Cup in March, which would have given her a chance to become the first person to perform the move internationally, and subsequently have it renamed ‘The Lee’.

However, the Olympic champion missed out on that opportunity when she failed to make the team for the competition, and opted out of competing the full-twisting Jaeger at the Paris Olympics, leaving her without an eponymous skill.