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Sunday, August 11, 2024
Jordan Chiles and the Jurisprudence of Sport
Jamie Fox (Stetson) offers an interesting Twitter thread on the brouhaha over the bronze medal in the women's floor exercise illustrating the jurisprudence of sport--the conflict (without a clear correct answer) among finality, substantive fairness, procedural fairness, formalism, justice, etc. He offers the thread to incoming law students to give them a sense of what they are about to encounter (and that it is not necessarily over the day's great moral dilemmas).
As things stand, the USOC plans to appeal the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling, although it is not clear what higher court would hear such an appeal--whether Switzerland's highest court or the European Court of Human Rights. And why should the ECHR care or have anything to say about the judging in a gymnastics competition?
One remedial piece to this, according to this report: In its appeal, Romania asked that the IOC award multiple medals--to give Ana Barbosu what she earned in the competition without humiliating Chiles by making her return the medal. This is an attempt at equity. But the case is complicated and I can see why, given its rules, IOC and FIG rejected it (not agreeing--just understanding). FIG sets its rules to avoid multiple medals, except as a last resort; judges use the execution score and then the difficulty score as tie-breakers. They award multiple medals only in the (unlikely) event of deadlock in all three scores. Barbosu and Romanian teammate Sabrina Maneca-Voinea had identical total scores, but Barbosu initially won bronze on the execution tiebreak. Moreover, this is not a simple case of flipping third and fourth. Chiles finished fifth in the initial scoring, below Barbosu and Maneca-Voinea--the judges' inquiry giving her an additional .1 point jumped her into third andvacating that decision removed that .1 and dropped her back to fifth. To give Barbosu a medal and allow Chiles to keep her initial medal requires that Maneca-Voinea also receive a medal. Romanian proposed doing that, likely because the additional medal would go to a Romanian. But I can see FIG not wanting to award three bronzes.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on August 11, 2024 at 03:40 PM in Howard Wasserman, Sports | Permalink
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