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 harassment 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.

Going for the Bronze

 

Curmie suspects he’s not alone in having a love/hate relationship with the Olympics, and both parts of that status have manifested themselves this time around.  The doping and spying scandals, the Dutch beach volleyball player who served time for raping a 12-year-old girl, the whoring out to corporate sponsors (too many to choose from), the dumpster fire that was NBC’s coverage of the opening ceremonies (no link here, Gentle Reader, because Curmie likes you)… all of these are good reasons not to care. 

Speaking of that opening, Curmie may or may not write up a few thoughts about that utterly silly, yes, silly, controversy over that alleged affront to Christianity that got a few seconds of air time.  But that’s a topic for another day, if indeed at all.

It is only fair to note that, to NBC’s credit, the insufferable jingoism of earlier Olympics coverage has been toned down to merely annoying, we are no longer subjected to interminable medal ceremonies celebrating Americans, and most of the announcers (especially for sports the average American doesn’t know very well) and hosts not named Mike Tirico have been pretty competent.  Forgetting the irrelevant and puerile squeals of Kelly Clarkson and the narcissistic and ultra-nationalistic bleatings of Peyton Manning (what the hell were either of them even doing there?) at the opening ceremonies will be difficult, but overall, this is the best NBC has done in decades.

The Olympics have been corrupted in innumerable ways since Curmie was a wee lad, but there are moments that will forever endure.  Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky had nothing to prove—both were already the GOATs of their respective sports—but they proved it anyway.  There were, of course, memorable efforts by non-Americans: Léon Marchand, Ariarne Titmus, Summer McIntosh, Tom Pidcock, the South Korean archery team, et al.  But all those gold medalists were expected to win; indeed, anything less would be a profound disappointment.

Curmie is well aware that there is a special kind of pressure to win when a silver medal would be considered a failure, and he’d really like to have trademarked the line “go for the gold,” but today he wants to talk about two American athletes who were rightfully thrilled to clinch a bronze medal for their team, not least because of the dramatic manner in which that was accomplished.  As Curmie writes this, only a couple of track and field events have been completed, and there’s still a long way to go before medals are awarded in sports like basketball, volleyball, and soccer.  But irrespective of what happens over the next few days, these third-place finishes will be near if not at the top of Curmie’s memories.

There have, of course, been some great stories of athletes who achieved individual bronze: women’s gymnastics alone has given us Suni Lee, Jade Carey, and Jordan Chiles, all of whom have personal as well as team-related reasons to call the Paris Olympics their “redemption tour.”  But the ones who clinch a team medal where there hasn’t been one in a long time… or ever… these are the ones that will stay in our minds for many a year.

First up, then, is Stephen Nedoroscik, a.k.a. Pommel Horse Guy.  His story is most fun because of who he is: a self-identified nerd who seems as proud of his speed in the Rubix Cube (under 10 seconds) as in his skills on the horse.  And when Curmie says “on the horse,” that’s it.  He does one event, whereas his teammates are all-arounders, and there was no little sniping from the pundits (including more than one who are now gushing about him) about including a one-event specialist on the team. 

On the sidelines, he meditates, seemingly oblivious in the goings-on around him.  He looks like a stereotypical nebbish, complete with Clark Kent glasses… until he takes off his warm-up jacket.  Yes, that’s the upper body of an athlete.  And then the glasses come off as he prepares his mount.  He says he “sees” the horse with his hands, not his eyes.  (One is tempted to wonder if eyesight is as much of a reason as innate skill for why Nedoroscik doesn’t compete in events like vault and bars.)

By the luck of the draw, the US team found itself on the pommel horse as their last event in the team final.  And Nedoroscik batted clean-up, the last American to compete.  He could secure the American men’s team its first medal in 16 years, or he could fail.  The routines at the Olympic level are by definition extremely difficult; two medal contenders in the event final a few days later fell off the apparatus altogether.  The pressure had to have been enormous.  And he nailed it.  The US medal wasn’t gold, but it was pretty special.

The only thing keeping this performance from being even more special was the fact that he didn’t actually need the metaphoric home run he hit. NBC analyst and former team gold medalist and pommel horse bronze medalist Tim Daggett said “ironically, he needs to hit a double… no, he needs a single… he needs to get on base.  He could take a walk; just don’t get out.”  He hit it out of the park, anyway.  And the meme-meisters went into high gear.

But if Nedoroscik didn’t need to be quite Clark Kent/Superman, Alex “Spiff” Sedrick pretty much had to be superhuman in the bronze medal match of the women’s rugby 7s.  Her personal story doesn’t have quite the allure of Nedoroscik’s quiet assassin schtick, but she is an unlikely heroine.  She was in her first Olympics, and is one of the smallest, if not indeed the smallest, member of the team in a sport in which size and strength are valuable commodities.  The face of the team in both Tokyo and Paris has been Ilona Maher, who’s 5’10” and 200 pounds; Sedrick is 5’3”, 137.

But both the play itself and the timing were extraordinary.  The US team had been pretty well crushed by eventual champion New Zealand in the semi-finals, and Australia was upset by Canada.  That meant that in the bronze medal game the US Eagles faced the pre-tournament favorite when the Aussies were undoubtedly a bit pissed off at the world.  Curmie was not optimistic.

Surprisingly, the Americans kept it close at 7-7 until with only about a half a minute left, Australia scored a try.  The only good news from the US perspective was that it was nearer the sideline than to the center of the pitch, making the conversion attempt more difficult; the kick did indeed sail to the left of the uprights.  Still, the Eagles trailed 12-7 with time quickly dwindling away.

The kick went deep into the US end, and the vaunted Australian defense seemed to have the American squad pinned a very long way from the try line.  Until they didn’t.  Rupert Cox, NBC’s play-by-play guy, called it thusly: “They’re going to have to go the distance here if they’re going to take this one to Golden Point [extra time].  Ilona Maher.  Ramsey.  Sedrick.”  Just then, with seven seconds remaining on the clock, Sedrick side-stepped one defender and, to use a phrase Curmie stole from some sports reporter (Curmie regrets that he can’t find the link to include here), “absolutely molly-whopped” another.

Cox then delivered what will surely be one of the most-remembered lines in Olympic TV coverage since Dick Bank’s “Look at Mills!  Look at Mills!” in the men’s 10,000 in 1964.  Cox exclaimed, “Spiff Sedrick’s AWAY!”  Sedrick made it only to midfield as time ran out, but the play in process could proceed, and she carried the ball straight down the middle of the field, diving over the try line after a 90-meter gallop, finishing with the grin you see at the top of this entry.  There was some confusion about the conversion, as Sedrick thought for a moment that she’d already won the match, and the normal kicker was on the sideline.  With only a few seconds remaining to attempt the kick, however, Sedrick nailed the conversion herself, and the first Olympic medal for American rugby in literally a century was secured by a final score of 14-12. 

Rugby, especially women’s rugby, got a huge boost in this country, and not just because Michele Kang donated $4 million to the cause.  Ordinary people, folks who’ll never make that kind of money in their entire lives, let alone be able to give it away, are going to check out the sport and follow the Eagles; some young girls (and boys, too, Curmie suspects) are going to find the sport that engages them.

Nike has been running a series of reprehensible commercials under the slogan “Winning Isn’t for Everyone,” suggesting that even a second-place finish is somehow shameful, or a sign of inadequate mental or physical toughness.  These ads appear regularly on coverage of the Olympics, which has since its origins purported to be about the competition, not the victories.  Yes, that sloganeering shows little relationship to the reality of the overwhelmingly commercialized and politicized fortnight and change, but the residue of the original intent remains.  We even see it manifested occasionally in congratulations and condolences between competitors, and that’s a good thing.

The medal Spiff Sedrick secured for herself and her teammates wasn’t gold, but the moment was nothing if not golden, and we’ll see the video replayed again and again for years to come.  She proved the acuity of the great twentieth-century philosopher Yogi Berra’s observation that “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over,” underscoring what should have been Nike’s message: there is no shame in not being the very best, but sometimes you can shock the world if you don’t give up.  Sedrick is something of a reverse Batman: Curmie isn’t sure this fractured nation deserves her, but she is very definitely the heroine we need.