United States gymnast Jade Carey will not have an opportunity to defender her gold medal in the Floor Exercise at the Olympics. She failed to qualify for the finals in large part due to a mysterious illness.
The 24-year-old has been unable to eat over the last few days and was completely out of it.
Carey had high expectations for Paris after she won the individual gold medal for Floor Exercise in Tokyo. However, her performance during the qualifying round could not have gone much worse. Not only did she take an awkward fall after bailing on a double tuck, she stepped out of bounds on multiple occasions and finished dead last with a score of 10.633.
The disastrous performance put Carey on the outside looking in and it was such a huge disappointment that she felt it was necessary to clarify why things went so wrong. An stomach bug is to blame.
Carey and her father Brian, a coach for Team USA, are sick. The latter missed a practice on July 25 while recovering from the illness. His daughter struggled on Sunday because of the ailment, which forced her to skip multiple meals over the course of the last week.
“I just have not been feeling well the past few days and haven’t been able to eat or anything. I had, like, no energy today and didn’t really have a sense of what was going on in my head. So, I just kind of wanted people to know that so, they know that there’s actually something wrong.”
— Jade Carey
As Aly Raisman pointed out, gymnastics is an extremely difficult sport when at your peak. It is nearly impossible for an athlete to succeed when he or she is not at his or her best.
We saw that with Carey on Floor. It was her worst performance at the Olympics, if not her entire career.
Fortunately, all was not lost!
Jade Carey rallied back on the vault and secured a spot in the Final on the next rotation. Team USA will hope that she can contribute during team competition on Tuesday. A medal in the individual competition on Saturday, August 3 is also a possibility. Both of those things hinge on her health!