American gymnast Jordan Chiles admires her bronze medal after the women’s floor final at the Paris Summer Olympics on August 05, 2024. On Monday, her lawyer filed a formal appeal with a Swiss court after a pending appeal resulted in the medal being stripped.
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Jordan Chiles, the American gymnast whose Olympic bronze medal was stripped by an arbitration court the day after the floor exercise final in Paris, has appealed her case to Switzerland’s highest federal court.
It was one of the most dramatic events of the Summer Olympics: The viral and historic medal ceremony – the first time three black women stood on the same medal podium in an Olympic gymnastics event – was canceled a few days later when an arbitration court ruled. the last-minute inquiry that boosted Chiles’ score to third place was submitted seconds too late.
Although U.S. gymnastics officials said they could provide video evidence showing “conclusively” that the investigation was filed on time, the Court of Arbitration for Sport declined to re-examine the case. Olympic officials announced they would “relocate” the bronze medal to Romania’s Ana Barbosu, who was awarded the medal at a ceremony in Bucharest last month.
Now, Chiles is asking the Swiss Federal Supreme Court to have CAS reevaluate the case.
“Jordan Chiles’ appeal presents the international community with a simple legal question – will everyone stand by when an Olympic athlete who is simply doing the right thing is stripped of his medal due to unfairness in an ad-hoc arbitration process? The answer to that question is definitely no,” Maurice M. Suh, legal counsel for Chiles, said in a statement. “Every part of the Olympics, including the arbitration process, must stand for fair play.”
The appeal calls for the CAS ruling to be vacated and the case to be reconsidered. The retrial, the law firm said, will allow Chiles to prepare his defense and present evidence, “including video footage showing that the coach’s scoring inquiry was filed on time.”
Jordan Chiles competes in the women’s floor gymnastics final during the Paris 2024 Olympics on August 5, 2024.
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When her scores were first posted in the competition on August 5, it appeared that Chiles had finished in fifth place with a score of 13.666, just shy of Barbosu, who had scored 13.7. But Chiles’ coach believes that the referee has miscounted him and filed an investigation immediately. The judges agreed, setting Chiles’ score up by ten points to 13.766.
The following day, the Romanian gymnastics federation appealed to an independent arbitration court. The CAS panel determined that the inquiry had been submitted four seconds too late and changed Chiles’ score to 13.666. Gymnastics rules require gymnasts in the finals of the competition to ask questions in one minute.
Chiles was heartbroken, the gymnast said. He faced torrents of racist online abuse over the dispute. The ordeal left her feeling as if more than a bronze medal had been taken from her, she said at the Forbes summit last week. “I follow the rules. My coach follows the rules. We do everything right, right,” he said. “I think he took it all.”
In his appeal to the Swiss court, Chiles also asked CAS to remove arbitrator Hamid Gharavi from future hearings. Gharavi, the presiding arbitrator in the hearing of Chiles, now provides legal counsel for Romania in another international process, the New York Times reported last month. (The court told the Times that Gharavi had announced the work and that no party denied his participation as chairman.)
“From start to finish, the procedures that led to the CAS panel’s decision were unfair, and it is no surprise that they led to an unfair decision,” the law firm Gibson Dunn, which is representing Chiles in the appeal, said in a statement. .
