Culture
Gymnastics officials let down Chiles and others, but unwilling to give 3 bronzes
If it was up to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, Jordan Chiles would keep her bronze medal for her routine in the women’s gymnastics floor exercise at the Paris Olympics, and Romanian gymnasts Ana Bărbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea would each get one, too.
But in a 29-page detailing of its ruling that led Olympic officials to strip Chiles of her first individual medal, CAS said the global governing body for gymnastics botched its officiating of the event and was unwilling to make up for it by awarding all three gymnasts medals, even though each of the athletes had arguments for the bronze.
The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) also did not keep track of the timing of an inquiry from Chiles’ coach about her score during the Aug. 5 competition, a lapse CAS called a “failure.” Ultimately, the court ruled the inquiry came four seconds after the allowed one-minute window for Chiles’ score to be checked.
The details from CAS on Wednesday squarely blamed FIG for the problems that arose during one of the most dramatic moments of the Paris Games. After the competition, Romanian officials appealed to the court, which had set up a three-person panel at the Olympics specifically to arbitrate disputes.
The panel said it was limited in its review, leading to heartbreak for the athletes.
“If the Panel had been in a position to apply equitable principles, it would surely have attributed a bronze medal to all three gymnasts in view of their performance, good faith and the injustice and pain to which they have been subjected, in circumstances in which the FIG did not provide a mechanism or arrangement to implement the one minute rule,” the court said.
The explanation of the ruling also detailed other serious issues with the administration of the floor exercise, which ended with Rebeca Andrade of Brazil winning gold and Simone Biles of the United States winning silver.
Since then, the scoring for Chiles, Bărbosu and Maneca-Voinea has become one of the most disputed and closely followed sagas of the Paris Games.
“The Panel expresses the hope that the FIG will draw the consequences of this case, in relation to these three extraordinary Athletes and also for other Athletes and their supporting personnel, in the future, so that this never happens again,” CAS wrote in its ruling.
The gymnastics federation did not return requests seeking comment.
USA Gymnastics, which was denied a chance to give new evidence to CAS, promised yet another appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal, the body that gives CAS its legitimacy for arbitrations. Successful appeals to the Swiss tribunal are uncommon.
USA Gymnastics said Wednesday the CAS details released earlier in the day showed USA Gymnastics did not have enough time to properly make its case for Chiles, and that it believes Chiles’ coach, Cecile Landi, submitted her review 47 seconds after the score was published.
“We will pursue these and other matters upon appeal as we continue to seek justice for Jordan Chiles,” USA Gymnastics said.
In her first time speaking directly about the controversy, Chiles posted on X on Thursday saying, “I will approach this challenge as I have others — and will make every effort to ensure that justice is done.”
She is holding out hope that her bronze stays just that. Her bronze.
“I believe that at the end of this journey, the people in control will do the right thing,” Chiles said.
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In a separate statement Wednesday, CAS pushed back on a New York Times report that the panel itself had a question of conflict because its head, Hamid G. Gharavi, had represented Romania for nearly 10 years in separate arbitration cases.
Gharavi serves as legal counsel to Romania for disputes handled by the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, The Times reported.
CAS said it “condemns the outrageous statements published in certain US media alleging, without knowledge of the above and before review of the reasoned award, that the Panel, and more particularly its chairman, was biased due to other professional engagements or for reasons of nationality.”
The court said that Gharavi’s participation was not challenged during the gymnastics arbitration, so “it can reasonably be assumed that all parties were satisfied to have their case heard by this Panel.”
USA Gymnastics said it had not seen disclosures about Gharavi or any other panelist, “nor have we seen the disclosures to date.”
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What we know about Jordan Chiles’ Olympic bronze medal case and what comes next
At the heart of the competitive dispute is the inquiry placed by Landi, Chiles’ coach, about how Chiles’ floor routine was scored. Chiles initially scored a 13.666 to place fifth. She was the last of nine gymnasts to compete, which gave her just one minute to place an inquiry under FIG regulations.
The judges allowed the inquiry in the moment, and raised Chiles’ score by 0.1 to 13.766. That moved her ahead of Bărbosu and Maneca-Voinea, who each scored a 13.700. (Bărbosu had an advantage over Maneca-Voinea due to a better execution score, meaning the judges believed she had a cleaner routine.)
In one of the more emotional scenes of the Games, Chiles screamed in celebration, while Bărbosu, who thought she had won bronze, dropped her Romanian flag out of shock and left the floor in tears.
But the appeal to CAS by the Romanian Gymnastics Federation found the timing of the inquiry was late.
After CAS released its initial ruling Saturday, FIG changed the final standings and the International Olympic Committee said it would reallocate Chiles’ medal to Bărbosu.
Bărbosu is set to receive her medal in a ceremony Friday, according to the Romanian federation.
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IOC’s handling of the Jordan Chiles ruling is disturbing and shameful
In the ruling shared Wednesday, CAS said FIG did not have a mechanism for figuring out immediately whether an inquiry was late, even though the inquiry was submitted electronically.
Donatella Sacchi, president of FIG’s Women’s Artistic Gymnastics Technical Committee, said when the inquiry arrived, “the information offered no indication that it had been received late.”
CAS said it made sense for Sacchi to proceed under the assumption that the inquiry was on time, because there was no setup to immediately show it was late.
“If the FIG had put such a mechanism or arrangement in place, a great deal of heartache would have been avoided,” CAS said.
FIG could also not identify the name of the person who took the inquiry, because the person was appointed by local organizers, Sacchi said.
Landi appeared as a witness at the hearing and said she knew the one-minute rule and “believed she had made the inquiry as fast as she could.”
CAS continued: “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.”
(Photo: Naomi Baker / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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