Simone Biles and Suni Lee Have the Perfect Explanation for Why They Both Fell off the Balance Beam: The Crowd Was Too Quiet

Under the best of circumstances, competing in an Olympic medal event is a red hot cauldron of intensity. In the words of 1979 Odor Eaters Champion Big Ern McCracken:

you’ve “got one foot in the frying pan and one in the pressure cooker. Believe me, as a bowler, I know that right about now, your bladder feels like an overstuffed vacuum cleaner bag and your butt is kinda like an about-to-explode bratwurst.”

And the pressure in that cooker has to be turned up by an order of magnitude when you’ve got Tom Brady looking on. Like any massive star, he’s got a gravitational pull that affects all who come into his orbit. So you can sort of understand how both Simone Biles and Suni Lee took diggers off the balance beam and, metaphorically speaking, off the medal stand as well.

Lee’s tumble was especially painful to watch. And if I could post a video of it here without running afoul of the Copyright KGB, you’d know what I’m talking about. The best way I can describe it is to borrow a phrase a chick my brother was dating who slipped off a wet boat dock and landed spread eagle on the edge of it. “I think I bruised my Hoo Hoo,” she exclaimed. That Lee was able to gather herself, climb back up on that narrow little 4×6 and complete her routine was a Profile in Courage the likes of which deserves the respect of all, regardless of whether you have a Hoo Hoo or not.

And both Lee and Biles were candid enough to put the blame for their subpar performances squarely where it belongs. On the people in the stands:

Simone Biles was left fuming with Olympics fans for ‘shushing’ in the middle of her balance beam routine on Monday after a rare mistake saw her miss out on a medal.

Before she recovered from a nasty slip in her warmup to win silver in the floor final, Biles failed to make it onto the podium for the first time at this summer’s Paris Games after she briefly lost her footing and was forced to step off the beam. …

Her USA teammate Suni Lee, who suffered a more disastrous fall when she came flying off the beam at the end of her routine, first revealed that both of them were thrown off by the ‘tense’ atmosphere inside Bercy Arena. …

“[H]onestly, we do better in environments when there’s noise going on, because it feels most like practice.

‘So today you can hear some of the Android ringtones going off, the photo clickers, whatever that was, and so, you know, you’re trying to stay in your zone. And then people start cheering, and then the shushing gets louder. So really, they should be shushed because they’re louder.

‘I don’t know. It was really weird and awkward. And we’ve asked several times if we can 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.’ …

Lee echoed the same earlier in the day, saying: ‘You could feel the tension in the room. I mean, the crowd shushing us for cheering.

‘We did not like that, just because it’s just so silent in there. I love hearing my teammates cheer for me.’

Well there you have it. Take that, paying customers! This is the Bercy Arena, not the 18th tee at Augusta. Shushing is for the public library and the Acela Quiet Car, not the final round of Olympic Balance Beam. These women are warriors. Fierce competitors. They thrive on noise and chaos. How can you expect them to concentrate with all that polite silence and rapt attention?

If these ladies wanted to play before a silent crowd, they would’ve gotten into poetry readings. Or stood on stage next to Ben Affleck when he was doing the Brady Roast. Biles and Lee are out there trying to stick the landing on a handstand forward roll. You idiots acted like you were trying to keep the aliens from A Quiet Place away. So it was all your fault.

So best of luck going forward, Team USA. Blaming the fans for your mistakes is the best approach every time it’s tried. And here’s hoping that in any and all of your future events, the stands will be full of noisy, bellicose, obnoxious Gymnastic fanatics and not these insufferably reverent assholes who tried to help you focus.