The 17-year-old gymnast tried to complete her full routine, but started to feel dizzy right before her last tumble and walked off the floor.
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Nottingham-born Downie is an accomplished and powerful tumbler but while somersaulting she failed to get her body all the way around and landed on the mat directly on her head and neck.
Ellie Downie gave her fans and team-mates a scare when she hurt her neck during a gymnastics routine during the qualifying competition at the Rio Olympics. Her coach and medical staff swooped in to assist her out of the arena. The top eight progress to Tuesday’s team final.
“We still had one more apparatus to go and we just had to block it out and we knew we had to deliver because we had already had a few mistakes”.
Downie, meanwhile, is now 12th in the all-around qualification and Claudia Fragapane 15th. Her beam routine was solid scoring 14.500 and her floor was even more impressive where she scored 14.600 to send the youngest member of Team GB in to the Olympic final. “They said “don’t do two vaults” and I said “if I’m going to do one I might was well do two”.
The British women, which includes her sister Becky, are third overall and into the final.
Ellie Downie: “I missed my tumble and landed on the top of my back and felt a bit shaky so decided not to compete my final pass”.
I crunched my neck and felt it crack a little bit.
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“They said just do one vault but if I was going to do one I was going to do two which I did. So I went out, came back, and I was fine”, she told reporters after the competition.
