It's good to be friends with Simone Biles. Many of the reasons are obvious: Biles is the greatest gymnast of all time, she comes off as cool as hell in interviews, she threw an Instagram funeral for her history-making vault, and she has stood up against both athlete abuse and also her haters. But now add this to the list: She's the reason video evidence exists that might be key to Jordan Chiles getting her bronze Olympic medal restored.
A little refresher: Chiles competed in the floor competition in Paris this summer, and her preliminary score put her in fifth. Afterward, one of her coaches, Cecile Landi, challenged her score. It worked; after reviewing one element of Chiles's routine, a Gogean, the judges bumped up Chiles's difficulty score by 0.1, which put Chiles in third place and pushed Romanian athlete Ana Barbosu down to fourth.
Days later, the Romanian Gymnastics Federation said it had filed an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. CAS found in favor of Barbosu, writing that their decision hinged on one key fact: According to the official timekeeping system for the meet, Landi filed her inquiry after 64 seconds had passed, but the official rules for the competition only allow for 60 seconds for the final competitor to challenge.
(I'm skipping over a lot here: how piecemeal the setup of timekeeping and logging inquiries sounded in the CAS summary of the gymnastics competition; the confusing answers given by Donatella Sacchi, president of the women’s technical committee; the multi-day delay in telling the United States an appeal had been filed. You can read all about that here.)
Earlier this week, Chiles's legal team announced that she had filed her appeal to the Swiss Federal Supreme Court and published the appeal online. (The filing is in German. I translated it to English using Google Translate.) The filing hit on several key issues, but the biggest one is this: A video crew was on the floor of Bercy Arena filming Biles for footage to use for the second half of her Netflix documentary, Simone Biles Rising. When Chiles got her score and her coaches debated if they should file an inquiry, Biles, her teammate and friend, was right by her side. The camera, intentionally or not, thus ended up capturing the audio of coach Landi filing the inquiry—and in the video, she does it in less than 60 seconds.
The video initially was linked in the appeal document. Since then, that link has been removed and video has been password protected, but thanks to Gymnastics Now it is still available.
The video also contained a second reveal—Biles's coaches had filed an inquiry on her score as well, but the inquiry was never processed. They can be heard talking about it in the video, with Laurent Landi saying he hadn't heard about Biles's score, and later adding that apparently their inquiry was never sent in.
Jessica O'Beirne, the co-host of GymCastic, said she spoke with Cecile Landi who gave her more details about what is seen in the video. Laurent Landi went to file an inquiry, then checked in with Biles on it, and finally walked back to the official, who gave him a thumbs up, which he took to mean that the challenge was in. But when he went back to check on it, Laurent Landi learned it had never been submitted. O'Beirne said she asked Cecile Landi about signatures because each inquiry is supposed to be signed but Landi told her, no, at the Olympics everything was done electronically and there were no signatures.
The filing also explained why the U.S. didn't know about the video evidence until after the hearing. As CAS admitted itself, the U.S. only had three hours to prepare, and the Biles documentary footage was separate from the Olympic TV feeds. Cecile Landi realized that the documentary crew might have video or audio that could help, so she asked its director, Katie Walsh, for the video and audio, which Walsh provided. The same day she got the video, Landi shared it with Chiles's mother and then an attorney for USA Gymnastics. USAG submitted it to CAS, but the court responded by saying it could not reopen the case, even in light of new evidence, and Chiles would have to turn to the Swiss courts instead.
Chiles's appeal also delved into the CAS process. It went into more detail about why it took three days for the court to properly notify anyone with the U.S. about what was going on. Not only did CAS use the wrong email addresses, its officials seemed to ignore any error messages it should have received in response.
The podcast Blind Landing recently did a two-part series digging into how the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG) actually runs its competitions. Host Ari Saperstein talked with a gymnastics judge—who noted that there isn't a mechanism for judges to provide FIG with feedback after competitions—as well as a professor of sports business who dug into all the ways FIG's near silence on what went wrong in Paris harmed all the athletes involved. Saperstein also spoke with Dutch gymnast Lieke Wevers, who competed in Paris and also got an incorrect out-of-bounds deduction during her floor routine. Wevers eventually got the officials to confirm that they had erred but, by then, it was too late. As she said, "The judges confirmed that they were wrong. The coaches confirmed that they were wrong. But the consequences were on me."
Gymnastics isn't the only sport where the people in charge screw up, admit they screwed up, and leave the athletes to suffer. But in other sports, leadership has taken action when bad calls on the field of play became a problem. What's most disheartening about the bronze medal debacle is there's no indication FIG will change or do anything to prevent this from happening again. Heck, the FIG president is now running for president of the IOC! Perhaps, one day, FIG will try to make their system better but, as Wevers said, it will be "mostly for their own reputation."
The appeal document, as translated into English by Google Translate, is below.
