First, a disclaimer: A whole lot of what follows won't sound very logical if you mostly follow, well, the ball sports, and some of it may seem downright bizarre if you are unfamiliar with the type of fussily chaotic institutional dysfunction familiar to the International Olympic Committee. If you know the IOC and how it operates, though, it should be familiar—both the needlessly intricate intricacies of international sports governance and also the high organizational tolerance for extremely stupid mistakes made by shadowy leadership that will suffer no consequences for their errors. I will do my best to explain, but don't say I didn't warn you. Facts, by dint of being facts, aren't always reasonable or sensible. And, again, this is the IOC we're talking about.
You've heard by now that the IOC has ordered Jordan Chiles to turn over the bronze medal she won last week on the floor exercise in women's gymnastics to Romania's Ana Barbosu. A reasonable response to this news is: Uh, they can just reassign medals? After that medal ceremony we all watched? What are they gonna do, send Chiles an international FedEx slip with an email saying "pls send medal before label expires tx." All great questions! The best way to understand how we got here is to walk through what happened.
On Aug. 5, Chiles competed on the floor exercise, where she went last. The judges awarded her a score of 13.666 for her routine, putting her in fifth place, with Barbosu in third and another Romanian gymnast, Sabrina Maneca-Voinea, in fourth. In the arena, Barbosu and the Romania fans in attendance celebrated her bronze with unbridled glee—a happy moment for a former gymnastics powerhouse that hadn't even qualified for the women's team competition in 2016 or 2020. Moments later, an announcement rang out in the arena that an inquiry had been made into Chiles's score, which the judges accepted; as a result, they were boosting Chiles's score to 13.766, putting her in third place and making her the bronze medalist. Chiles burst into tears. Her teammate, Simone Biles, looked happier for Chiles's bronze than she had for her own silver.
Now would be a good time for a technical clarification: Though the IOC oversees the Olympics, the rules and regulations for how each sport is competed are set by that sport's federation. FIBA sets the rules for basketball, FIFA sets the rules in soccer, and, in gymnastics, the rules come from the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique, better known as FIG. Per FIG's rules, an inquiry must be filed "within four (4) minutes at the latest"—unless, that is, the competitor filing the inquiry is the final gymnast to go, which Chiles was. In that case, the rules limit the inquiry to within "one (1) minute after the score is shown on the scoreboard."
How often does an inquiry work? Occasionally. As Emily Giambalvo explained in the Washington Post, "It can be risky—scores can go up or down. Federations must make a payment to an FIG foundation if a gymnast’s score does not change or goes down as the result of an inquiry. Together, the risk and the financial cost deter coaches from inquiring all the time."
The Post reported that in Paris, U.S. technical lead Chellsie Memmel said she thought they stood a chance of challenging successfully on one of Chiles's elements, a Gogean. So they challenged, and it worked. The judges reviewed the element and boosted the difficulty score by 0.1, which elevated Chiles from fifth to third. The change visibly and quite naturally devastated Barbosu and the Romanian fans in the arena. Because Chiles had gone last, they had already started celebrating, which was understandable given that inquiries don't always work. (In the arena, unsuccessful inquiries were announced throughout the competition, adding to the shock when the one for Chiles did succeed.)
That sadness dissipated minutes later during the medal ceremony. Chiles received the bronze medal, and she, along with Simone Biles (silver) and Rebeca Andrade (gold), together made the first all-black podium in women's Olympic gymnastics history. Biles and Chiles both bowed to Andrade, a Brazilian gymnastic legend in her own right, in a photo that went viral. To a casual Olympics watcher, that was the end of that. It was off to new sports to watch.
Days later, the Romanian Gymnastics Federation said it had filed an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport on behalf of Barbosu and Maneca-Voinea. (CAS is the fancy international sports court created by the IOC to handle complaints about international sports. Like the IOC, it's based in Switzerland.) Romania's federation raised several issues to CAS:
- The inquiry for Chiles was submitted after the one-minute deadline, specifically four seconds too late, therefore it shouldn't count and Chiles's score should not have been changed.
- Maneca-Voinea had been docked 0.1 points for stepping out of bounds when actually she had not stepped out of bounds, which would have given her a higher score.
Romania requested a final ranking that would give all three gymnasts bronze medals. On Saturday, CAS issued its ruling. They said that the inquiry filed on Chiles's score had indeed been submitted after the one-minute deadline, which would reduce Chiles's score back to 13.666. It also dismissed the question about Maneca-Voinea's foot appearing in bounds, with no explanation given but probably because no inquiry was filed at the time of the competition. Lastly, it ruled that FIG needed to re-rank gymnasts with the old Chiles score reinstated and then award medals accordingly. (If CAS sounds familiar to you, it might be because it is also the court that upheld rules that banned Caster Semenya from competing.)
FIG did as it was told and re-ranked the gymnasts, which it announced in one of the shortest and pithiest press releases I've seen in a long time. It did not address the many questions fans had about what happened in the arena, which judges were involved, who had screwed up, and what was being done to make sure it didn't happen in the future. Anyone looking for accountability and public disclosures sure wasn't getting any answers from FIG. Then the IOC, which officially allocates medals, said that they would reallocate the bronze to Romania and were in touch with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee "regarding the return of the bronze medal." What does that mean? Not much. There is a history of athletes not returning medals. As the Wall Street Journal explained, "There’s little anyone can do to actually retrieve Chiles’s medal."
The Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee said on Tuesday that Barbosu would take possession of the Olympic bronze medal on Friday. But will that actually be the bronze medal given to Chiles? It's just as likely it will be one of the spares made for each Olympics, as noted by the WSJ, which once again underlines the point that there's no good reason to try and negate Chiles's bronze to begin with.
USA Gymnastics said afterward it sent video evidence to CAS showing that Chiles's coach, Cecile Landi, had filed the request within 47 seconds, putting it within FIG's one-minute rule. A day later, on Monday, USAG said in a statement it had been told by CAS that "their rules do not allow for an arbitral award to be reconsidered even when conclusive new evidence is presented." USAG said it would continue to explore its legal options, including the Swiss Federal Tribunal, "to ensure the just scoring, placement, and medal award for Jordan." On Tuesday, USA Today reported a source told Christine Brennan that CAS "did not reach out to the right U.S. officials as the CAS prepared for last week's Romanian appeal" of the Chiles bronze.
There are by my count something like 10,000 different ways to be infuriated at all this. The podcast GymCastic reported that a source told them Romania and the U.S. agreed to share the bronze, but the IOC and FIG said no. As the podcast Blind Landing noted on a recent episode about what happened, approximately 159 medals in Olympic history have been revoked and "almost all of them were because of doping and failed drug tests, and the other ones were also because of an athlete directly violating a rule." As Brennan noted at USA Today, the IOC as recently as 2002 gave out multiple medals to resolve a judging controversy. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that documents showed that Hamid G. Gharavi, the head of the CAS panel that ruled in favor of Romania, "has represented Romania for almost a decade in arbitration cases."
Australian gymnast Heath Thorpe spoke for a lot of people when he pointed out, "Why are the athletes the ones to suffer due to a judging error/oversight? Where is the accountability? Where is the 'athlete wellbeing' that is spoken of so often?"
It is here where the Olympics—both the IOC itself and its tangled web of international sports governing bodies, all of which are accountable to just about nobody—reveal their truest selves. Olympic wickedness? Athletes forced to suffer while the craven goofs in charge suffer no consequences? The only unifying element being everyone is unhappy after the fact? If you know how these institutions work, it's tough to imagine how this could have worked out any other way.
There is, of course, nothing stopping the IOC from handing out two or three or bronzes or just kicking a bronze to every athlete who competed on floor for having to put up with this nonsense. Well, one thing: taking action to remedy any of this would require these institutions being accountable to somebody. Anybody. That would have been a truly shocking outcome. Instead, there is just this, and a painful reminder that, when powerful people are left with little to no oversight they behave in ways that suit themselves, and it will be the workers, or in this case the athletes, that suffer the consequence.
