Promising as the video evidence backing Jordan Chiles’ claim to her bronze medal is, it never should have come to this.
And nothing can ever undo the damage that’s been done or the heartache she’s suffered.
Her bronze medal on floor exercise at the Paris Games should be the crowning personal achievement of Chiles’ career, her first individual medal in two Olympic appearances. Instead, it’s been tainted by legal wranglings and online abuse, her joy and pride now forever colored by disappointment and hurt.
All because other people, people whose jobs it is to know better, screwed up in almost every way imaginable.
The International Gymnastics Federation. The Court of Arbitration for Sport. Even Romanian officials, who trampled over Chiles in their zeal to get for their athletes something they did not deserve.
Chiles and her coach followed the rules, as the video submitted with her appeal filed Monday so clearly shows. Yet Chiles is the one who’s been punished, stripped of her medal — for now — not because of anything she did but because of the incompetence and ineptitude of others.
“Jordan Chiles’ appeals present the international community with an easy legal question — will everyone stand by while an Olympic athlete who has done only the right thing is stripped of her medal because of fundamental unfairness in an ad-hoc arbitration process? The answer to that question should be no,” Maurice M. Suh, counsel for Chiles, said in the statement Monday announcing her appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal.
“Every part of the Olympics, including the arbitration process, should stand for fair play.”
And nothing about this process has been fair.
Chiles initially finished fifth in the floor exercise, her score of 13.666 putting her behind Romanians Ana Barbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voineau. (The Romanians had identical scores of 13.7, but Barbosu placed higher because of a better execution score.) But Cecile Landi, who is Chiles’ personal coach in addition to being the U.S. coach in Paris, appealed her difficulty score, arguing Chiles had not been given full credit for a tour jete, a leap.
A review panel agreed, and the additional 0.100 elevated the American ahead of both Romanians into third place.
That’s when things went sideways.
Romania appealed, submitting several different arguments before settling on the claim that Chiles’ inquiry was filed too late. The Court of Arbitration for Sport sided with the Romanians, ruling that the official timing system showed Chiles’ inquiry had been made four seconds past the 60-second deadline.
But the rules are a gymnast has 60 seconds after a score is posted to make a verbal inquiry, not that the inquiry must show up in the system within 60 seconds. That might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s not. Common sense tells you making a verbal inquiry and registering it are not simultaneous, yet the CAS ruling made the assumption they were.
We know now they were not. The video shows Landi saying, “Inquiry for Jordan!” twice within the 60-second deadline. If there was a delay in registering it, that isn’t Chiles’ fault and can’t be held against her.
As for why CAS didn’t have that video during its hearing, add that to the list of the tribunal’s failings.
Chiles, USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee didn’t know for three days that they were parties to the Romanians’ appeal because CAS was using either wrong or outdated emails. How this was possible, given the USOPC and CAS had been in frequent communication throughout the Games about a medals ceremony in Paris for U.S. figure skaters and the wrong emails were generating bounce-back messages, begs belief. You almost have to try to be that incompetent.
When the Americans finally were informed, it was less than 24 hours before the CAS hearing. There is no way to read the many documents in the case, analyze the arguments, craft a response and prepare for a hearing in that amount of time.
There also was no need to. Contrary to Romania’s claim about the need for a quick decision so the medals table would be accurate before the end of the Games, nothing demanded urgency in this case. The floor exercise medals had already been awarded. The gymnastics competition was over. No one’s ability to participate was at stake. There would have been no material difference in a decision made on Oct. 10 from one made on Aug. 10.
Except that maybe it would have given the CAS arbitrators time to have gotten it right. And Chiles wouldn’t have been put through an emotional wringer.
“My heart was broken,” she said last week during an appearance at the Forbes Power Women’s Summit.
This all could have been avoided. And even if Chiles does get the title of bronze medalist back, as she should, it can never make up for everything else she lost.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.