This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
On Sunday, as the world celebrated the end of another Olympics and America’s medal-leading team bade adieu to Paris in a cloud of chocolate muffin residue, I know what you were thinking: But wait! How can these redemptive, avant-garde, possibly contaminated but nevertheless ebullient Games end on a stone-cold bummer? The entire gymnastics world is currently in a state of apoplectic rage about its controversy over the bronze medal in women’s floor exercise. Worse yet, several innocent athletes will now remember Paris primarily as a source of anguish, all because a bunch of officials had one job, didn’t do it, and are taking their incompetence out on everyone else.
Here’s what happened: In the last moments of the floor exercise final on Aug. 5, American Jordan Chiles’ score put her in fifth place by less than a tenth of a point, behind two Romanian gymnasts, Ana Barbosu and Sabrina Voinea (whose tie score was broken by Barbosu’s higher execution score, putting Barbosu in third.). As Barbosu held the Romanian flag aloft to celebrate the once-dominant nation’s return to the medal stand after 12 years in obscurity, a shock! The American coaches had submitted an inquiry about the start value that judges had awarded to Chiles. That inquiry—a routine procedure challenging a start value as too low—was accepted, and Chiles was placed in third and awarded the bronze.
What resulted was an iconic moment on the medal podium—and abject fury from Romanian gymnasts and their fans, which rose to a fever pitch thanks to a signal boost from legend Nadia Comaneci. This in turn resulted in Romania’s breakneck petition before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, where Chiles’ inquiry was deemed invalid—but not because her skill in question was re-devalued. It was because her coach, Cécile Landi, had placed the inquiry too late … by four seconds. (Coaches have exactly one minute to challenge a final competitor’s score after it’s given.) As you can imagine, behind the scenes of this official kerfuffle were thousands of bile-filled social media screeds from the now-weaponized fandom, including a cesspool of racist vitriol in Chiles’ mentions. (I will not dignify any of this bile with a link, but you are welcome to peruse replies to her if you enjoy encountering slur after slur.)
Because the CAS invalidated the result of Chiles’ inquiry, her original score was reinstated. But the real travesty is what happened next: The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG), whose judging incompetence made all of this happen, shrugged its stupid shoulders and said reallocating medals would be up to the International Olympic Committee. The IOC then shrugged its stupid shoulders and said it was beholden to the FIG’s results and therefore had no choice but to strip Chiles of her medal and reallocate it to Barbosu. (The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee appealed; it didn’t go well.) This happened even though Romania went on record saying that it would be happy to share the medal, because that is the literal spirit of the freakin’ Olympics, and this veritable ouroboros of dipshittery is not.
Allow me to rub my hands together as I remind you who is to blame here. First? The various judging panels, who operate under FIG authority and committed several verifiable errors during the Olympic floor competition, including accepting the U.S. inquiry when its own rules said that it was too late and, while we’re at it, counting a faulty out-of-bounds for Voinea. Just think: If Voinea had been judged correctly in the first place, her score would have been a 13.8—higher than Barbosu or even Chiles’ altered score—and she would have won bronze uncontested. Literally none of this would have happened!
An honorable blame mention, however, must alight upon the accursed skill whose retroactive credit for Chiles started this entire merde storm: the split leap 1.5. This murderous skill is a so-called dance element, with a “D” value in the Code of Points; the code’s alphabetical scale awards an “A” value for the simplest skills, a higher “B” value for the next most difficult, and so on. The problem with this skill specifically is that unlike gymnastics’ death-defying flips, if a gymnast fails to crank its universally displeasing 1.5 rotations around before she lands (or fails to hit a 180-degree split), judges usually award it as if it were the single-twisting version: a “C” skill worth one-tenth fewer points. Thus, although a gymnast would never consider chucking a tumbling skill out of their reach for fear of certain death (or, at very least, a fall that would incur a full point off), there is nothing stopping gymnasts from chucking the 1.5 split leap all day. (Even its original namesake, Gina Gogean, later had her name officially removed from this element for chucking it herself!) Was Chiles’ leap actually rotated enough to count? I’m not here to adjudicate that, but, gun to my head? No, because they rarely are.
Gymnastics’ high-value “dance” elements like this one have a more general problem, though, which is that they are hideous and ungraceful and are, frankly, doing nothing for the sport. Chiles and her coaching team choosing to include the 1.5 is not a moral failing by any means; my beef is with the Code of Points itself for allowing—nay, rewarding—elements such as this. Every Olympics, four-year fans notice (or remember) that women’s artistic gymnastics seems to have yeeted the “artistic” part in favor of graceless “dance” that involves mostly these godforsaken leaps that require a full-floor-length running start and, to the untrained eye, all look the same. (And don’t get me started on the shoulder-cranked pirouettes, which make anyone who’s had more than six months of ballet faint.)
Viewers often blame the current state of floor exercise on its tumbling-heavy emphasis—indeed, the spate of “artistry deductions” in the 2024 Code of Points was supposed to rectify this. But all it did was make floor scores lower across the board, because it’s flipping impossible to be “artistic” when you have to take seven sprint-steps before attempting and failing to force around a leap nobody wants to see—or train!—in the first place. The irony!
Again: It bears repeating that the innocent parties in all this are the gymnasts themselves. Barbosu did nothing but hit a good routine and express some understandable sadness when the standings that she had every reason to believe were final suddenly weren’t. Voinea did nothing but hit a good routine and incur a deduction that we now see to be unfair. And Chiles did nothing but hit a good routine and attempt a leap that just about everyone tries; her coaches were the ones who chose to inquire, and they did so in good faith.
The only way to make any of this right is to grant a bronze medal to literally all three gymnasts. Barbosu technically has the highest official score of the three, and therefore she is in actual third place and deserves a bronze medal. Voinea, however, should have the highest score of the three and thus deserves a bronze medal. And Chiles’ coaches made the inquiry in good faith, the inquiry was accepted on the field of play, then she was awarded that bronze medal. She deserves to keep it regardless of her adjusted score—because there is simply no reason for stripping an athlete of a medal because of someone else’s mistake.
Olympic medals get stripped for cheating and doping. Indeed, the Paper of Record right this moment has an incomprehensible piece explaining that Chiles is now peers with a century’s worth of cheaters and juicers. Excuse me? The only time something close to this has ever happened in gymnastics was after the 2004 men’s all-around final, when South Korean Yang Tae-young was retroactively deemed underscored and the result was … for the FIG president to write (incorrect) gold medalist American Paul Hamm a letter asking him to pretty please send the gold to Yang as a gesture of sportsmanship! Hamm declined, Yang is still understandably bummed about it, and Hamm is still credited as the winner. (The reason? Yang’s appeal wasn’t filed in time. See a pattern?)
I am pretty sure the members of the IOC are just being unprecedented assholes to someone who happens to be a Black woman—but come on. At a minimum, the optics of having the only time this has ever happened be to the detriment of a Black woman are horrific. That social media tidal wave of hate and racist schadenfreude already show how this precedent gives fire to every racist on the internet currently pronouncing DEI with a hard r, and it makes young Black athletes everywhere fear that their medals will be second-guessed. This is especially egregious considering that the CAS took two years to strip an obviously doping Russia of figure skating medals—and as far as any of us know, they still have their medals in hand.
The worst trolls of the internet aside, much of the world wants those three gymnasts to share the bronze medal. Chiles, who has done nothing but hype up other gymnasts her whole career, is having her one moment of individual glory—which she literally used to hype up another gymnast—stripped as if she’s the villain. Barbosu has done nothing to deserve the legacy of her earned bronze being tainted. And Voinea still, after all this, gets jack squat! Yet again, it bears repeating: Excuse me?
The IOC has the power to end this in the actual Olympic spirit—which, hokey as it is, is supposed to be the real winners were the friends we made along the way. Instead, for deeply disingenuous “fairness” reasons that actually betray a cowardly Spiderman meme of buck passing, the committee has woken up day after day since this started and chosen violence. It’s an unconscionable precedent, and I have real fear of its repercussions.
