During a critical hearing that ultimately led to American gymnast Jordan Chiles losing her Olympic bronze medal, USA Gymnastics and Chiles’s coach did not object to her opponent’s assertion that they had missed the one-minute deadline to ask for Chiles’s score to be reconsidered, according to a document released Wednesday by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The new details added intrigue to a dispute that is still playing out over a week after the competition ended and is likely to continue in court. USA Gymnastics has promised to continue efforts to appeal the decision after CAS rejected its initial attempt. In its unsuccessful appeal, USA Gymnastics argued CAS should consider new video evidence the organization believes proves the challenge from Chiles’s coach had, in fact, been made within the time limit.
The new CAS document also shows that days passed before USA Gymnastics officially was informed of the effort to challenge Chiles’s medal, giving U.S. officials little time to prepare for the hearing – a lapse that could provide grounds for Chiles to appeal the decision to a Swiss tribunal.
The ruling that led to the revocation of Chiles’s medal centered on the timing of the inquiry that ultimately increased her score. The official timekeeping system recorded the inquiry as being placed 1 minute 4 seconds after Chiles’s score posted, the document shows. During the hearing, USA Gymnastics did not question the accuracy of the timekeeping system, and Chiles’s coach, Cecile Landi, testified that the official recorded her request for an inquiry “immediately.”
In response to the appeal to CAS by Romanian Gymnastics Federation, an arbitral panel ruled Chiles’s original score should be reinstated. The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) modified the results of the floor final accordingly, with Chiles finishing fifth and Romania’s Ana Barbosu in third. The International Olympic Committee confirmed Barbosu would receive a bronze medal and Chiles must return the one she received on the podium.
CAS failed to make contact with the Americans to notify them of the hearing until Aug. 9, less than 24 hours before the Aug. 10 hearing, arbitrators wrote, despite initial attempts to contact them on Aug. 6. The delay, a USA Gymnastics spokesperson said in a statement, “was due to CAS sending case filings to incorrect email addresses.” After the Americans argued the court’s deadline was unreasonable as a result of the delay, CAS extended it by two hours.
The day after CAS’s ruling, USA Gymnastics said in a statement that it had time-stamped video proving Landi initiated the inquiry 47 seconds after the score was posted. USA Gymnastics said the footage was not available to the organization at the time of the hearing. But CAS told USA Gymnastics its rules do not allow for a decision to be reconsidered in the face of new evidence. USA Gymnastics said it plans to pursue other avenues of appeal, including to the Swiss Federal Tribunal.
In a statement Wednesday, USA Gymnastics reaffirmed that it “strongly disagrees” with the court’s decision and will “continue to seek justice for Jordan Chiles.”
The CAS document also raises questions about the effectiveness of FIG, which also was criticized recently for an administrative error that affected a gymnast’s qualification for the Olympics last fall. Donatella Sacchi, the president of FIG’s women’s technical committee, admitted in her testimony that FIG did not have any formal system in place for monitoring whether score inquiries were submitted on time.
When an arbitrator asked Sacchi who was in charge of tracking the one-minute rule, she responded, “You ask me something difficult, very difficult to answer … We don’t know either, so we’re trying to find out.”
And when Sacchi received Chiles’s inquiry, the document said, she admitted that “she was not in a position to verify – and did not verify – whether it had been submitted within time.”
Had the inquiry been denied at the time because of tardiness, the results of the competition would not have needed to be updated nearly a week later. Sacchi explained in the hearing that when she received the inquiry on her tablet, “the information offered no indication that it had been received late.” She believed she had no reason to question whether the appeal had been submitted in accordance with competition rules.
In response to the CAS panel’s request to provide information about the person in charge of monitoring and enforcing the deadline for inquiries, FIG said the person was not a FIG official but rather someone appointed by the local organizers. FIG was not able to not identify this person, which the panel described as a surprise.
Landi, the coach of Chiles and a witness at a hearing, told the panel she was aware of the one-minute deadline and “believed she had made the inquiry as fast as she could,” but “she was not able to state with certainty whether she made the inquiry within or beyond the one-minute time limit, as everything had happened in a great rush.”
Other gymnasts who competed in the floor final filed inquiries 82 and 95 seconds after their scores appeared, but the one-minute deadline applied only to Chiles because she was the final gymnast to perform. The sport’s technical regulations state that inquiries must be filed before the following gymnast’s score appears, but the last gymnast in the rotation must adhere to a one-minute deadline.
USA Gymnastics did not challenge the information from the timekeeper’s official report and did not ask for more time to verify the information or to provide additional evidence, according to the document.
The CAS panel determined there was no evidence to support that the one-minute deadline should be interpreted to have flexibility and the enforcement of the rule does not fall within the field of play doctrine, by which CAS does not interfere with decisions made by officials during a competition.