In 1972, the US Olympic men’s basketball team took a one-point lead over the Soviet Union in the gold-medal game in Munich with three seconds left. Through a chaotic sequence of events, those three seconds were played three times. The third time was the charm, for the Soviets at least, and they took a one-point win.
The US men have, for 52 years, refused to take their silver medals. They sit unclaimed in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the International Olympic Committee has refused to reconsider the outcome of the game.
The IOC has, however, asked US gymnast Jordan Chiles to return a bronze medal over another timekeeping issue – this one, a full four seconds.
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Under gymnastics rules, a request for an inquiry must be lodged within one minute of a score being posted. The USA lodged such an inquiry over Chiles’ score, arguing that the judges made an objectively provable mistake in one aspect of her floor exercise. The inquiry was upheld, and Chiles was awarded the bronze medal. But Romania’s gymnastics federation appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas), saying the inquiry was lodged 64 seconds after Chiles’ score was posted. CAS agreed, and the IOC is asking Chiles to return her supposedly ill-gotten bronze medal.
The irony in Romania’s Cas appeal is that the federation also sought to appeal an 0.1-point penalty given to Sabrina Maneca-Voinea, though the timing of such an appeal can be measured on a calendar rather than a stopwatch. CAS dismissed that aspect of Romania’s appeal in one sentence.
But Romania’s gymnastics officials weren’t asking for Chiles to return her bronze medal. They were asking for duplicate bronze medals for Maneca-Voinea and Ana Barbosu, who the IOC have declared is now the bronze medalist.
And there is indeed a precedent for awarding duplicate medals when questions over judging get too convoluted to sort out. That precedent was set in 2002, when a scandal that spread all the way into allegations of Russian mafia interference led the IOC to award a duplicate gold medal to the Canadian figure skating pair of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier.
Another precedent to consider – Jim Thorpe, whose name is invoked in any discussion of the greatest athletes ever, was stripped of his gold medals in the 1912 Olympic decathlon and pentathlon after the authorities learned that he had made about $30 a month playing minor-league baseball, thus contravening the Games’ amateurism rules. He lost the golds even though the 60-day deadline for appeals to strip athletes of medals had long passed, by about four months. A mere 110 years later, Thorpe was declared the sole winner of those events.
The argument against Chiles keeping the bronze is that rules are rules, and the USA simply filed its inquiry four seconds too late.
Or did they?
The USOPC is arguing that it wasn’t given time to prepare an adequate defense. On Sunday afternoon, USA Gymnastics dropped a bombshell, claiming time-stamped evidence that the inquiry most certainly was requested within a minute of the score being posted – to be more precise, 47 seconds.
“The video footage was not available to USA Gymnastics prior to the tribunal’s decision and thus USAG did not have the opportunity to previously submit it,” USAG’s statement reads.
Even if Cas, the IOC and the International Gymnastics Federation find fault with this new evidence, they’re in the awkward spot of demanding the return of a medal even after the judges concluded that Chiles was indeed the gymnast who turned in the third-best routine in the floor exercise. And they’ve put two innocent athletes through turmoil. Barbosu was clearly shattered when her celebrations were cut short by the announcement of Chiles’s successful inquiry, and now the American has withdrawn from social media to protect her mental health while wondering if she really will have to mail a bronze medal to France, Switzerland or Romania.
If the new evidence holds up, the governing bodies will have no choice but to let Chiles keep the medal – which would be devastating for Barbosu once again. And at that point, if they don’t decide to give multiple bronze medals, the IOC will need to say what differentiates this situation from what took place in 2002.
The whole drawn-out situation is a mess and the ones who are suffering the most are athletes who have done nothing wrong.
