At the Olympics, seconds matter. Anyone who’s watched the Games — or, really, any athletic competition — knows the difference even a fraction of a second can make. It’s the difference between a basketball going up just before the buzzer sounds alternatively of the minute after and the difference between a championship and an elimination.
This persnickety counting is only expected to substance on the field of play itself — the court, the pitch, and, in the case of gymnastics, the mat. But at the women’s level final in Paris, 4 seconds off the podium have become more crucial than any flips and twists done during the competition. These 4 seconds have spiraled into a monthslong saga that implicated the officials managing the athletics and immiserated the athletes who’ve been caught up in this mess.
It began in the seconds after the women’s level exercise final. US gymnast Jordan Chiles completed her regular and sat down to await her score. She was the last 1 to compete, and her mark would find the final rankings of the artistic gymnastics event in Paris. Chiles had helped the US squad take gold but kept missing out on opportunities to win solo medals. This level final was her 1 and only shot on any individual hardware.
When her score of 13.666 was posted, Chiles smiled, but not her typical exuberant one. She had placed fifth, little than a tenth distant from a medal.
Nearby, Ana Barbosu of Romania was smiling and laughing as the reality of the bronze started to sink in. This medal marked Romania’s return to the Olympic medal podium for the first time since 2012. The erstwhile dominant program that had fallen off the cliff competitively for over a decade had yet clawed its way back to relevance.
But things weren’t as final as any of the gymnasts thought. Cécile Canqueteau-Landi, 1 of Chiles’ coaches, had momentarily disappeared to submit an enquiry into her difficulty score, and the Superior Jury, which handles specified matters, had accepted it. Chiles’ 13.666 became a 13.766, which launched her from 5th to 3rd and onto the podium.
When the fresh score was announced, Chiles sprinted down the sideline, passing Barbosu who was standing on the competition podium with a Romanian flag, and collapsed in tears. Barbosu looked around, momentarily confused, the crushing disappointment just starting to hit her. She had been bumped down to 4th and out of the medals.
The ecstasy of triumph and the agony of defeat in a single frame — the kind of thing that the Olympics is known for. Inquiries, on the another hand, though ubiquitous in gymnastics, usually happen with far little fanfare, and viewers seldom take note of them. Scores go up by a tenth or 2 and sometimes go down. Usually, all of that gets left on the field of play.
But here, another competition — between the 2 countries’ teams and between the different organizations that mediate Olympic gymnastics — was just beginning.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
Within 24 hours of the medal ceremony, Romania had brought a complaint before the Court of Arbitration of athletics (CAS) seeking to overturn the results. Initially, according to the evidence submitted by Chiles’s legal team, they tried to challenge the result of the enquiry on gymnastics grounds, saying that the jump that was subject to review was insufficiently rotated and shouldn’t have been credited. That didn’t work. Their second objection was about an erroneously applied out of bounds deduction that took Sabrina Voinea-Maneca out of the medals. Had her coach — who is besides her parent — inquired into this deduction, Voinea-Maneca would’ve had the bronze.
The case that was presented in front of CAS said nothing about an underrotated leap. The focus shifted from performance to, simply, bureaucracy: they decided to question the timing of Chiles’ enquiry though Voinea-Maneca’s out of bounds deduction remained in the conversation, too.The Romanian Gymnastics Federation claimed Chiles’s challenge was submitted besides late and should have never been considered in the first place.
This had the feel of a fishing expedition, of trying different tacks to find 1 that would give Romania the bronze medal they felt that they had earned, 1 way or the other; it didn’t even substance which of the 2 Romanian gymnasts went home with the bronze.And this gambit worked. CAS concluded that Chiles’ enquiry had been submitted besides late. Her enquiry was timestamped 4 seconds beyond the one-minute time limit, according to Omega, the authoritative timekeeper of the Olympic Games. This consequence was devastating for the American gymnast. Chiles’ score reverted to 13.666, and she was dropped back to 5th place. Barbosu was elevated to the bronze medal position.
But determining whether Chiles’ enquiry was truly 4 seconds over time is simply a much fuzzier task than simply looking at a clock — and Chiles’ squad argued that they had been wronged.
But what about the rules?
At last year’s planet championships in Antwerp, Kathi-Sue Rupp, a Category 2 Brevet level men’s gymnastics justice who served as 1 of the enquiry officials, described the process for filing an inquiry. The screen of the tablet that she worked from had 2 sections: 1 that had a list of the gymnasts who had just finished their routines within the last minute and another that had gymnasts who had completed their routines within the last 4 minutes. It’s a bit more complicated in qualifications or all-around competitions since more than 1 gymnast is competing at the same time. But the athletes went up singly at the Paris level final, making for a little dizzying process. The enquiry authoritative who accepted Landi’s challenge wouldn’t have had a list of names to go through to find Chiles’. By the time her score was flashed, it was besides late for anybody else to file one.
“If a gymnast or coach had an inquiry, they would come over to the enquiry desk [and] tell me that they wanted to put in an enquiry for whoever the gymnast was,” Rupp said. “I would look for their name on that list underneath a minute, pull up, open their file, ask them, ‘Okay, you didn’t agree with the D score. What D score do you think it should have been?’ I would then request to input the D score that they think it should have been and hit submit.”
Everything in the process takes time, from the coach approaching to her asking them for the name of the athlete and the skill they want to look into. “Me just saying that took more than 4 seconds,” Rupp pointed out.
There is no mechanics stopping an enquiry from being submitted even if it is processed after the allotted time, according to Alain Zobrist, chief executive of Omega. “We’re just providing the judges with the technology according to the rules of the Federation,” he told The Verge erstwhile explaining how the strategy works comparative to this circumstantial field of play. Basically, the way that Zobrist presents the case, Omega is simply a glorified log-creating service. (They do another timing functions in gymnastics, despite it being a “scoring sport,” due to the fact that there are time limits on certain events, like level exercise and balance beam. Also, erstwhile a gymnast falls from an apparatus, they have a limited time to remount and resume their routine, and Omega would time that as well.)
Chiles’ squad tried to argue all of this — that they’d submitted the enquiry on time, that there had been an understandable hold — but CAS shot it down with a unanimous decision. On August 14th, they ruled that Barbosu would receive the bronze medal.
The CAS decision, however, might not be the final word. On September 16th, Chiles’ legal squad filed an appeal with the Swiss national Tribunal, the only entity that can compel CAS to reopen the case, citing far more procedural mismanagement than anything detailed in the first decision: misdirected emails leading to highly delayed notifications for US athletics officials, which impacted their ability to prepare for the tribunal; missing file attachments; and a major origin of conflict of interest on the three-person adjudication panel.
But they besides presented compelling evidence that challenged the authoritative communicative of the decision — that Landi had verbally inquired Chiles’ D-score before the 60-second time limit had been exhausted. They had audio and documentary footage from religion of Sport, the production company that was trailing Chiles’ teammate, Simone Biles, throughout the Olympics in Paris for the upcoming episodes of the Netflix series, Simone Biles Rising. The combined audio and visuals capture Landi verbally inquiring more than erstwhile before 1 minute had elapsed from the minute that Chiles’ level score was posted in the arena.
The 4 seconds that had seemed authoritative in the CAS decision seem much little so now. Or, at least, these seconds can be seen in a fresh light. They tell us erstwhile the enquiry intake officer inputted the challenge, not erstwhile it was proffered by the coach. A discrimination with a very large difference as far as Chiles’ supporters are concerned. But what about the rules? The global Gymnastics Federation had this peculiar 1 on the books — 60 seconds to inquire for the final gymnast in a rotation — but what emerged from the proceeding is that this was never strictly enforced, down to the second, due to the fact that there was no mechanics to mark the precise time of the verbal inquiry.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
The audio of this process after Chiles’ first score was posted was heard in the RoS footage that her lawyers provided. Landi can be repeatedly heard saying “Inquiry for Jordan” before the one-minute mark, presumably to be heard above the din in the arena.
No substance how rapidly Rupp or anyone else works, there will always be a tiny lag between the verbalizing of the enquiry and inputting it into the system. It would be impossible to do them simultaneously.
A key argument in Chiles’ appeal revolves around this point — that all the timestamp tells us is erstwhile the enquiry was entered into Omega’s system. In the CAS proceedings, Donatella Sacchi, the president of the women’s method committee, said that erstwhile the enquiry was inputted, she received a notification on her tablet alerting her to it so she and the remainder of the Superior Jury could begin the review. She explained that there was no flag on the play, meaning no indication that the challenge was anything but timely, so she went ahead and reviewed the component in question.
The Omega system, according to Chiles’ appeal, besides did not contain any mechanisms to account for the lag between erstwhile a verbal enquiry is made. CAS may have said that FIG does not offer any leeway in its own rulings, but on appeal, lawyers are noting that the same strategy that is supposedly unambiguous, in fact, offers its own anticipation of doubt.
What was made clear in the evidence in front of the ad hoc tribunal was that there was actually no way for FIG to evidence the exact time that a verbal enquiry was submitted; the only thing the system, Omega or otherwise, can tell us is erstwhile it was manually inputted by an official.
“I felt force to get it in on time,” Rupp noted about the process of logging a verbal inquiry, especially given the strict time constraints coaches are under to submit. “My biggest fear was not being fast adequate [to] open up the files and get the process going.”
Chiles’ overall appeal is based on 2 legal strategies. The first is about the athlete’s “right to be heard,” claiming CAS rejected an appeal out of hand and the process of proceeding Romania’s complaint through an ad hoc tribunal on a rushed timeline denied her due process and rights of responses. The second claim — and the 1 that Chiles’s legal squad emphasized the most in their filing — is that 1 of the 3 CAS appointed jurists had an apparent conflict of interest in determining the result having done prior work for the country of Romania.
Videos from NBC’s broadcast, a video squad shooting the documentary on Simone Biles, and a broadcast from Olympic Broadcasting Services show Chiles’ coach verbally submitting the enquiry before the one-minute deadline as part of the evidence filing. Audio from these feeds clearly shows Cecile Canqueteau-Landi saying “inquiry” more than erstwhile between the 49 and 60 second marks.
The timestamped multiple feeds supply a fresh wrinkle in the expected unambiguous log. It shows a fresh timeline that was not considered erstwhile determining the validity of the multiple claimants on the Paris 2024 women’s level exercise bronze medal.
If these appeals make 1 thing clear, it’s that things like inquiries are just as much on the field of play as a sky advanced double somersault. A athletics where all component is subjectively evaluated needs correctives that account for human error.
Right now, to gymnastics leadership, this tension can only be resolved with more technology. To FIG president Morinari Watanabe, it’s not the technology that’s holding the athletics back, but the human. “This is due to the fact that we’re not able to break our own prejudices due to our traditions,” he said about the women’s level exercise final. “We request change. We request challenges. And we request the courage to decision forward.”
In the end, this communicative comes down to timing. But it besides comes down to margins.
Chiles’ appeals could drag out well beyond this year, as it did in the case of the 2022 Olympics squad figure skating medalists. It took over 2 years for that case to wend its way through CAS and for the medals to be reassigned. The skaters were awarded their upgraded medals at a peculiar ceremony in Paris this summer.
Whether or not specified proof — wherever it comes from — will sway the Swiss national Tribunal remains up in the air. But the evidence from the Olympics’ timekeeper was unambiguous, according to Zobrist. “No substance erstwhile the enquiry is done, the strategy would evidence a time,” he said. “The evidence is the log. So, the minute you push the button, that’s the logs that we get.”
Yet, Omega’s log is now no longer the only timed part of evidence that will find how FIG’s rules get interpreted. Chiles’ legal squad has provided video evidence that shows a fresh timeline, reintroducing ambiguity to the events that followed the level exercise final.
We already have the ability to parse and dissect the athletics of gymnastics on a granular level. But sometimes erstwhile we offer expected clarity on the field of play, we make fresh complexities that we could not foresee with small mechanisms to enforce them.
In the end, this communicative comes down to timing. But it besides comes down to margins.
One swimmer out-touching another at the pool wall to claim a medal. A sprinter leaning forward to win the race in a photograph finish. It’s easier to accept the athletes themselves, through their performance, generating those miniscule margins than it is to accept those created by paperwork that feels altogether divorced from the athleticism.
Technology has made it possible for us to measurement time in infinitesimal increments and perceive minute differences in performance. But as the fiasco around the women’s level final in Paris demonstrates, technology, on its own, without sound policies and consistent enforcement, is not a tool for better field management. All that does is make the human failure all the more legible.
