U.S. officials didn’t object to key claim in Jordan Chiles medal case, document shows

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. 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 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 the 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 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. Advertisement 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. 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 “rushed” hearing, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee said in a statement to The Washington Post, made it “impossible to raise” the video evidence that contradicted the timeline. 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.” Advertisement 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. Landi, the coach of Chiles and a witness at the 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.” Advertisement 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. 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. – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/08/14/jordan-chiles-court-bronze-medal/