Incompetence and Arrogance of Olympian Proportions

 

The three women you see pictured at the top of the page, Gentle Reader, currently stand in the third (i.e., bronze medal), fourth, and fifth positions in the Olympics final in the women’s floor exercise. You see them from top to bottom in their relative positions as Curmie writes this; whether those will be the final rankings remains to be seen.

Anyway, from the top down we see Romania’s Ana Bărbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea, and the US’s Jordan Chiles.  Each of them has reason to believe that she—and she alone—should be the bronze medalist.  But a series of judges’ fuck-ups (sorry, Gentle Reader, there is no other term) have turned what should have been an easy ranking into a brouhaha that makes clear that whatever the NCAA or FIFA may do, the IOC isn’t going to give up its title of Most Corrupt and Incompetent Sports Organization without a fight.  But wait!  Who’s that coming up on the outside?  It’s the Tribunal Arbitral du Sport (Court of Arbitration for Sport), or TAS,  staking their claim, and they’re backing it up with hubristic posturing!  It’s coming down to the wire, Gentle Reader, and it’s anyone’s race!

Curmie has already made clear his distaste for sports which rely on the subjective opinions of judges rather than on some objective criterion.  Yes, referees can make mistakes, but at least we know that the team that scores the most points will win, as will the swimmer who touches the wall first.  In these events, it’s clear: the US won a gold medal in the 100m sprint because a photograph made it clear that Noah Lyles’s torso crossed the finish line .005 seconds before Kishane Thompson’s did.  The US women’s basketball team also narrowly won gold, beating the French team by a single point.

Those close finishes seem more arbitrary when there’s no objective way of distinguishing between the performances.  It’s also true that gymnastics is second only to figure skating in terms of judges giving credit to established stars just because they’re established. 

But let’s assume for the moment that the judges’ votes, though subjective, were both informed and honest.  The point that if you were to ask a dozen experts which of the three women discussed here was the “best,” suggesting that all three would get at least two votes apiece is both accurate and irrelevant.  These women didn’t go to Paris to get a participation trophy.

OK, so what happened?  By the time Chiles, the last to do her routine, hit the floor, the gold and silver medals were de facto wrapped up by Rebecca Andrade and Simone Biles, but the bronze was very much up in the air.  Bărbosu  and Maneca-Voinea were tied on points, with the former placed third because her execution score was higher.  Chiles performed well, but came up just short, with a score of 13.666, behind the two Romanian women’s 13.700.  But American coach Cecile Landi submitted an inquiry about Chiles’s difficulty score.  Less than a minute after Chiles’s score was posted, the appeal was granted, her score was raised by a tenth of a point, and she catapulted from fifth to third.

By this time, Bărbosu had already draped a Romanian flag over her shoulders to celebrate the first of her country’s Olympic medals in gymnastics in a dozen years: this in a sport once dominated by the likes of Nadia Comăneci.  Indeed, from the time Comăneci appeared on the scene in 1976 through 2012, six different Romanian women won Olympic gold in the floor exercise, and ten earned a medal of some color, averaging more than one competitor per Olympics on the podium.  This was big for the individual gymnast, but perhaps even more so for her country.

Needless to say, Bărbosu was devastated by the change in Chiles’s score.  It’s completely understandable that she felt frustrated, betrayed, and, yes, bitter.  Her initial response garnered her a substantial amount of harrassment on social media.  Of course, Chiles suffered that fate, as well, being accused of cheating, as if she had anything to do with the judges’ decisions.  Chiles received the bronze at the medal ceremony, and initiated one of the iconic images of the Games, as she and Biles bowed to Andrade in a gesture of respect and friendship to their Brazilian competitor.

But the story doesn’t end there.  The Romanian team submitted a challenge, claiming that the inquiry about Chiles’s score came after the allotted one-minute window for such appeals.  The TAS ruled that Landi’s challenge did indeed come in four seconds too late, and was therefore disallowed.  That meant Chiles’s score reverted to 13.666.  The TAS kicked the subject of what should happen to the medal back to the FIG (the Fédération International de Gymnastique) who punted the decision back to the IOC, who predictably ignored the Romanian team’s suggestion that all three women should receive bronze medals.  The IOC decided that, having already awarded Chiles the medal, they wanted it back, despite no wrongdoing on Chiles’s part.

But, as they say in the late night infomercials, Wait!  That’s not all!  Notice that the Romanians suggested that not merely Chiles and Bărbosu should receive medals, but so should Maneca-Voinea.  Why?  Well, the Romanian team sought to change her score because she suffered a tenth of a point reduction for stepping out of bounds… which replay showed she did not do.  But that appeal was denied, without explanation (!).

In other words, if the judges had done their job in the first place, Maneca-Voinea would have had a score of 13.800 and would have won the bronze medal.  Even with the extra tenth of a point she received for doing a more difficult routine than she was initially given credit for, Chiles would have finished behind her.  The inquiry, even if it was late, was still submitted before Chiles’s score was posted (the one minute timetable is from the end of the routine), so it would have gone forward, but there’d be no reason for the Romanians to quibble about the timing, because it wouldn’t have affected the medals.  No one cares who was fourth as opposed to fifth. 

Who precipitated the kerfuffle?  Not Chiles or Landi.  Not Bărbosu or Maneca-Voinea or their coaches.  This is all on the judges, the IOC, the FIG, and the TAS.  And not because somebody thinks Gymnast A was “better” than Gymnast B.  No, this is all about getting things objectively wrong.

Let’s not forget that getting Maneca-Voinea’s score correct in objective terms would have prevented all this.  But competent judges would have prevented the Chiles/Bărbosu controversy, as well.  They could have noticed that Landi’s inquiry came too late (assuming it did), and said, right then and there “we’re sorry, this request came outside the time limit, and we therefore can’t review the situation.”  Or they could have waited an extra 30 seconds or so before posting Chiles’s score, thereby announcing only the upwardly-revised total, placing her directly into third place, and not giving Bărbosu the impression that she’d won a medal, only to snatch it away moments later.

The US team subsequently submitted time-stamped evidence that Landi’s inquiry was submitted after 47 seconds, not 64.  The TAS, of course, refuses to re-examine the case in the light of new evidence, and Chiles has been ordered to return her medal.  After all, it’s her fault that the governing bodies fucked up and apparently believed false information (Curmie apologizes if it appears he’s strayed into politics here).

The two teams are, of course, looking after their own, but the Romanian suggestion that the three women each receive a medal is easily the closest we could get to a judicious and ethical conclusion.  Bărbosu has gone on social media commiserating with Chiles (she knows what it feels like, after all), and hoping that the three of them will share a podium in Los Angeles in 2028.  The athletes, the eldest of whom is Chiles at 23, are showing a lot more maturity and a lot more humility than the constipated and flat-out stupid narcissists at the IOC and TAS.

The US team vows to continue the fight to allow Chiles to keep the medal they believe is her due.  Curmie makes no prediction what will happen down the road.  What he does know is that if he were Jordan Chiles or Ana Bărbosu and they came for my medal, I’d be sore tempted to tell them to perform an exercise best suited to extremely limber hermaphrodites.  And I’d know, or at least suspect, that Sabrina Maneca-Voinea might just have a better case than I do.

EDIT: two new pieces of evidence further demonstrate the bungling of the TAS.  First, they notified the wrong US officials of the hearing (!).  Oh, and the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution reports that Dr. Hamid G. Gharavi, the head of the hearing board which handed down the TAS decision, has represented Romanian interests in such cases on numerous occasions.  That doesn’t mean that he’s corrupt, of course, but he’s definitely pulling a Clarence Thomas by not recusing himself when there’s plenty of appearance of conflict of interest.