Gymnast Suni Lee Reveals WHY She & Simone Biles Fell Off Balance Beam | 2024 Olympics 

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Team USA gymnast Suni Lee shares why she and teammate Simone Biles fell off the balance beam during the Aug. 5 final, saying that the “quiet” arena threw off their athlete mojo! Suni Lee has won two bronze medals and one gold medal at the 2024 Olympics.

2024 Olympics: Gymnast Suni Lee Explains Why She Fell Off Balance Beam

Team USA gymnast Suni Lee shared why she and teammate Simone Biles fell off the balance beam during the Aug. 5 competition explaining that the arena was just too quiet.

Turns out quiet makes Suni Lee feel off balance.

The Team USA gymnast—who has won two bronze medals and one gold medal at the 2024 Olympics—shared what caused her and fellow teammate Simone Biles to fall off the balance beam during their Aug. 5 competition in Paris.

“It was really silent when you get up there,” Suni told reporters afterwards . “I don’t like that just because it gives me too much time to think and I can hear everything.”

The mix of stress and quiet caused issues for the gymnasts, including Romania’s Sabrina Voinea, who also fell.

“I like the cheering,” the 21-year-old continued. “I don’t like the silence. I don’t like it. I thrive off the crowd, so having the crowd’s energy especially after you finish a routine is really helpful.”

Suni joked that she could “literally hear myself breathing,” and was more stressed about the fact that “everybody could hear me breathing when I was up there.”

Simone doubled down on how the quiet impacted her.

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“Beam final is always the most stressful,” she told reporters via NBC News. “But usually, we have like music or background noise, whatever that may be.”

According to the 27-year-old, the gymnasts “do better in environments when there’s noise going on because it feels most like practice.”

“It was really weird and awkward,” she continued, “and we’ve asked several times if we could have some music or some background noise. So I am not really sure what happened there, but yeah, not our favorite. None of us liked it. Yeah, it was an odd beam final.”

But not everyone had issues with the balance beam, as Team Italy’s Alice D’Amato took home the gold while Zhou Yaqin of China earned silver and Italian gymnast Manila Esposito walked away with bronze.

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And luckily the Olympians are keeping a sense of humor about their falls, with Suni even playing into a TikTok trend and sharing a video of her mishap Aug. 6 with the caption, “unfortunately i was selected for the olympics.”

But Suni was feeling celebratory on Instagram, sharing several photos of her Olympics journey Aug. 5 and writing, “2x olympian, 6x olympic medalist.”

For more great moments from the 2024 Paris Olympics, keep reading.