Team USA’s star gymnasts, Sunni Lee and Simone Biles, have sent shockwaves through the gymnastics community after revealing the extraordinary reason behind their unusual falls from the balance beam during the Olympic competition. Not to be outdone, the reigning queens of gymnastics, who have together won two bronzes and a gold during this last Olympics, stumbled not due to physical errors, but because of an EERIE, pin-drop silence that threw off their groove in a big way. Sunni Lee was a bit more vocal than Simone and admitted to reporters on the floor that “It was really silent when you get up there. I don’t like that, just because it gives me too much time to think, and I can hear everything.”

Biles aligns herself with Lee’s opinion. She explained that the arena’s uncharacteristic quiet made the athletes feel uncomfortable. In Biles’s words to NBC News, “The beam final is always the most stressful, but usually we have, like, music or background noise. We’ve asked several times if we could have some music or some background noise, so I’m not really sure what happened there.” Being able to hear a pin drop just before one of the most difficult gymnastic maneuvers that an athlete can perform, for a half-second before it is executed, is a condition that the U.S. team wasn’t prepared for. But the Italian and Chinese teams performed under the same conditions and somehow rose to the occasion in one of the most important events in the world of gymnastics.

The American gymnasts aren’t moping over their lack of selection for the Olympic team! In fact, Sunni Lee joined in the TikTok trend of expressing disappointment over not making the Olympic team, with her video shot in a light-hearted, humorous tone. In her TikTok, she said, “Unfortunately, I was selected for the Olympics,” which is an oxymoron if there ever was one! Who knew the absence of sound could be so damning? Stay tuned for more not-so-insider gossip and stunning revelations from the Olympic stage!