What has become the most notable epic fail of the Paris Olympics began with heartbreak. Ana Barbosu, a Romanian gymnast, appeared to place third in the floor event finals of the artistic gymnastics competition and prematurely celebrated her victory. Moments later, she wept as another gymnast moved into bronze medal position.
Jordan Chiles, Barbosu’s American competitor, initially appeared to place fifth in the competition. But after an inquiry by her coach, the judges agreed that Chiles deserved full credit for a leap they hadn’t scored and bumped her up to third place, above Barbosu and another Romanian gymnast, Sabrina Maneca-Voinea. The two Romanians had, in fact, received the same overall score, but in a tiebreaker, Barbosu was ranked higher based on her higher execution score.
The online backlash against Chiles’s bronze medal win was immediate, intense and unwarranted. But the slipshod nature of what has become a seemingly endless saga of inquiries and international rulings has cast a shadow over what should have been the sporting career highlight for three tremendous gymnasts.
The Romanian Gymnastics Federation appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an international body that settles disputes in international sporting competitions. It ruled that Chiles’s coach’s inquiry had come four seconds too late, voiding her appeal and revised score. The panel then ruled that the International Gymnastics Federation should determine the final ranking of the gymnasts. The federation subsequently passed the decision on to the International Olympic Committee, which has stripped Chiles of her bronze.
There are additional complicating factors in this murky moral mess, including whether Chiles’s coach had in fact submitted the inquiry too late or whether Maneca-Voinea, the other Romanian, should not have received an out-of-bounds deduction that lowered her score. (Video replays showed that she did not step out of bounds.) If the judges had awarded Chiles full credit for her leap and more accurately scored Maneca-Voinea, then Maneca-Voinea would have finished third, Chiles fourth and Barbosu fifth.
There’s also a timeliness factor: If the Chiles inquiry was indeed too late, then it should not have been accepted. But it was accepted, and now the International Olympic Committee has decided to take back a bronze medal days after it was awarded, a dishonor usually reserved for athletes who have doped.
The Romanian Gymnastics Federation has proposed a solution that would ameliorate the mistakes made by officials that make sense: rank all three gymnasts third and give them all bronze medals. There is precedent for awarding duplicate medals (albeit in figure skating), and such a move would duly acknowledge that these three gymnasts were failed more by their judges than their own skill.
For sports like gymnastics, which are arbitrated by judges instead of, say, the click of a finish line camera, crediting gymnasts with the appropriate difficulty levels and accurately determining whether they stayed in bounds is crucial for the sport to function fairly. Given the incompetence of these officials, awarding each of these athletes a medal would be the most just outcome.