(Aug. 16) Not since the time when officials outrageously gave the Soviet basketball team three chances to make the gold-medal-winning shot over the U.S. in 1972 has an Olympic medal decision been so brazenly unjust. There is, however, an argument to be made for a solution to satisfy all sides.
At issue is the already infamous back-and-forth about which athlete should get the bronze medal for the women’s gymnastics floor exercises at the Paris Olympics. The judges first awarded the medal to Romanian Ana Bărbosu, but upon an appeal by U.S. coaches, the judges gave it to American Jordan Chiles instead. Then, a higher bureaucracy, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, reversed the earlier reversal and demanded that Chiles give the medal back to Bărbosu. The arbitrators’ decision stinks like three-day-old roadkill.
I’m no gymnastics expert, but certain elements in this brouhaha appear to be incontrovertible. The first is that while there, of course, is at least some subjectivity in judging gymnastics, everybody officially stipulates that one of the largely objective parts of judging, a “degree of difficulty” calculation for specific elements of the routine, had been inaccurately recorded. If that’s the case, then Chiles deserved to have her original score recalculated upward. In terms of who actually earned the medal, then, Chiles was the winner. Period, case closed.
As Romanian Olympic legend Nadia Comaneci accurately noted, this was emotionally devastating, even unfair, to Bărbosu. On the other hand, it is, in essence, no different than an NFL final-play goal-line call being reversed upon video review, thus turning the apparent winners into losers. If the revised call upon review is correct, it’s correct, no matter how it hurts those who first were told incorrectly that they had won.
Then, the Court of Arbitration for Sport butted in. Somehow it claimed that while gymnastics rules require appeals of judges’ scores to be filed within a single minute, the American coach took 64 seconds, a mere four seconds too many, to appeal. The medal, it ruled, must go back to Bărbosu. On such a tiny technicality, it said that an objectively mistaken judges’ score should be reinstated. Here’s where things get not just wrongheaded but morally corrupt. The U.S. coaches offered to submit video proof that they had filed the appeal not just within the one-minute allotment, but actually with 13 seconds to spare. Assuming that is true, then this should be case closed in Chiles’s favor. The officious arbitrators have no right, zero, to overturn a correct decision on the basis of a technicality that itself is inaccurate. …. [The full column is here. BUT…… The whole thing gets even worse. I was not aware until my colleague Tiana Lowe Doescher showed this to me, but yet another Romanian gymnast actually should have won the bronze medal. She was incorrectly docked a point for stepping out of bounds, when indeed she did not actually mis-step. Romania appealed that decision, but for some reason the judges incorrectly rejected the appeal. See this video. My column’s exposition of ethical behavior stands, but if that same logic and ethics were applied to this new information, then Sabrina Maneca-Voinea should have won bronze.]
