Jade Carey explains fall on floor, says she hasn’t been feeling well

PARIS — U.S. gymnast Jade Carey said she has been fighting an undisclosed illness in recent days, citing the bug as the reason for her uncharacteristically poor performance on floor exercise in Sunday’s gymnastics qualifying round at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Carey, 24, told Olympics.com that she hasn’t “been able to eat or anything” over the past few days due to the illness and wanted to disclose the issue so fans didn’t assume she was being affected by nerves. USA Gymnastics had previously announced that her coach and father, Brian Carey, missed the team’s podium training Thursday because he was not feeling well.

“I had, like, no energy today and didn’t really have a sense of what was going on in my head,” Carey told Olympics.com. “So, I just kind of wanted people to know that so, they know that there’s actually something wrong.”

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Carey later added on X, previously known as Twitter: “I haven’t been feeling the best the past few days but I gave it everything I had today. Thank you for all the support I have received. I’m so grateful.”

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Carey and the other members of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team did not stop to field questions from reporters in the mixed zone.

Carey competed in two events Sunday: Floor exercise and vault. She was terrific on the latter, recording an average score of 14.433 across two attempts that should be high enough to carry her into the eight-woman final on the apparatus. But she struggled significantly on floor, the event in which she won Olympic gold at the 2021 Tokyo Games.

The Oregon State product hopped out of bounds on multiple tumbling passes, then rolled onto her back and almost off the mat on her last pass. She finished with a shockingly low execution score − a 6.433 out of 10 − and nine-tenths of a point in deductions. Her overall floor exercise score of 10.633 ranked dead last after the first two sessions of qualifying and was roughly 3.5 points lower than the average score she earned at the U.S. Olympic trials about a month ago.

USA Gymnastics staff appeared to be aware of Carey’s illness entering Sunday. When asked what happened with Carey on floor, U.S. technical lead Chellsie Memmel said, “I know because I’ve been with the team, but that’s Jade’s story to tell.”

Team USA was able to drop Carey’s woeful score on floor in qualifying, where four athletes per country compete on each apparatus and the lowest score is automically removed. But it would not be able to do so in the team final, which is Tuesday night in Paris. In the final, each country puts up three athletes in each event and every score counts.

If Carey is still feeling ill Tuesday, Suni Lee would likely join Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles as Team USA’s three representatives on both floor and vault. Hezly Rivera, the 16-year-old who rounds out the team, is expected to compete on balance beam and uneven bars.

Biles’ status for Tuesday also appeared in question midway through Sunday’s round, when she felt some pain in her left calf and had her ankle taped. But she continued competing and her coach, Cecile Landi, said she does not have any concerns about Biles being unable to compete in the coming days.

Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on social media @Tom_Schad.