UPDATE (August 11, 2024, 7:20 a.m. ET): The International Olympic Committee said Sunday that U.S. gymnast Jordan Chiles must return her bronze medal in the floor exercise, upholding findings that a coach’s protest that got her on the podium shouldn’t have been allowed.
USA gymnast Jordan Chiles’ bronze medal in the floor exercise is in jeopardy after a sporting arbitration body determined that an appeal for her score in the category was incorrectly granted.
In a ruling issued on Saturday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport said an inquiry request from Chiles’ coaches had been submitted four seconds after the one-minute deadline and is therefore void, and consequently her points should be lowered to her initial score.
Chiles had been given a 13.666 score for her performance on Monday, which put her in fifth place behind Romania’s two gymnasts. Team USA coaches quickly filed an inquiry as to the difficulty of one of her moves, a tour jeté with a full turn, and the judges raised her score to 13.766, bumping her to third place.
The sudden change in Chiles’ score clearly shocked Ana Barbosu, the Romanian gymnast who initially had the third-highest score. Barbosu had been holding her country’s flag, ready to celebrate making the podium, when she was bumped to fourth place.
The Romanian Gymnastics Federation later filed multiple appeals to the CAS challenging the score adjustment.
The CAS said in its Saturday ruling that the International Gymnastics Federation will determine the ranking of the final and assign the medals according to the court’s decision. The FIG has yet to make any public comment about the ruling.
USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee said in a joint statement that they were “devastated” by the CAS’s ruling. They said the inquiry was “filed in good faith, and, we believed, in accordance with FIG rules to ensure accurate scoring.” The groups also objected to the online harassment of Chiles over the score appeal: Throughout the appeal process, Jordan has been subject to consistent, utterly baseless and extremely hurtful attacks on social media. No athlete should be subject to such treatment.
Chiles’ Instagram posts have been flooded with comments accusing her of “stealing” an Olympic medal from the Romanian gymnasts. Her mother, Gina Chiles, wrote in a post on X on Friday that the 23-year-old has received “racist disgusting comments.” After the ruling, Chiles posted heartbreak emojis on her Instagram story. She also wrote that she was removing herself from social media for her mental health.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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