The most controversial Olympics moment came down to four seconds

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 instead of the moment after and the difference between a championship and an elimination. 

This persnickety counting is only supposed to matter on the field of play itself — the court, the pitch, and, in the case of gymnastics, the mat. But at the women’s floor final in Paris, four seconds off the podium have become more important than any flips and twists done during the competition. These four seconds have spiraled into a monthslong saga that implicated the officials managing the sport and immiserated the athletes who’ve been caught up in this mess.

It began in the seconds after the women’s floor exercise final. US gymnast Jordan Chiles completed her routine and sat down to await her score. She was the last one to compete, and her mark would determine the final rankings of the artistic gymnastics event in Paris. Chiles had helped the US team take gold but kept missing out on opportunities to win solo medals. This floor final was her one 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, less than a tenth away 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 once dominant program that had fallen off the cliff competitively for over a decade had finally clawed its way back to relevance.

But things weren’t as final as some of the gymnasts thought. Cécile Canqueteau-Landi, one of Chiles’ coaches, had momentarily disappeared to submit an inquiry into her difficulty score, and the Superior Jury, which handles such matters, had accepted it. Chiles’ 13.666 became a 13.766, which launched her from fifth to third and onto the podium.

When the new 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 fourth and out of the medals.

The ecstasy of victory and the agony of defeat in a single frame — the sort of thing that the Olympics is known for. Inquiries, on the other hand, though ubiquitous in gymnastics, usually happen with far less fanfare, and viewers rarely take note of them. Scores go up by a tenth or two and sometimes go down. Usually, all of that gets left on the field of play.

But here, another competition — between the two countries’ teams and between the different organizations that mediate Olympic gymnastics — was just beginning.

Within 24 hours of the medal ceremony, Romania had brought a complaint before the Court of Arbitration of Sport (CAS) seeking to overturn the results. Initially, according to the evidence submitted by Chiles’s legal team, they tried to challenge the outcome of the inquiry 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 also her mother — 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’ inquiry though Voinea-Maneca’s out of bounds deduction remained in the conversation, too.The Romanian Gymnastics Federation claimed Chiles’s challenge was submitted too 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 one that would give Romania the bronze medal they felt that they had earned, one way or the other; it didn’t even matter which of the two Romanian gymnasts went home with the bronze.And this gambit worked. CAS concluded that Chiles’ inquiry had been submitted too late. Her inquiry was timestamped four seconds beyond the one-minute time limit, according to Omega, the official timekeeper of the Olympic Games. This result was devastating for the American gymnast. Chiles’ score reverted to 13.666, and she was dropped back to fifth place. Barbosu was elevated to the bronze medal position.

But determining whether Chiles’ inquiry was really four seconds over time is a much fuzzier task than simply looking at a clock — and Chiles’ team argued that they had been wronged.

At last year’s world championships in Antwerp, Kathi-Sue Rupp, a Category 2 Brevet level men’s gymnastics judge who served as one of the inquiry officials, described the process for filing an inquiry. The screen of the tablet that she worked from had two sections: one 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 four minutes. It’s a bit more complicated in qualifications or all-around competitions since more than one gymnast is competing at the same time. But the athletes went up singly at the Paris floor final, making for a less dizzying process. The inquiry official 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 too late for anybody else to file one. 

“If a gymnast or coach had an inquiry, they would come over to the inquiry desk [and] tell me that they wanted to put in an inquiry 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 need 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 four seconds,” Rupp pointed out.

There is no mechanism stopping an inquiry 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 when explaining how the system works relative to this specific field of play. Basically, the way that Zobrist presents the case, Omega is a glorified log-creating service. (They do other timing functions in gymnastics, despite it being a “scoring sport,” because there are time limits on certain events, like floor exercise and balance beam. Also, when 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’ team tried to argue all of this — that they’d submitted the inquiry on time, that there had been an understandable delay — 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 team filed an appeal with the Swiss Federal Tribunal, the only entity that can compel CAS to reopen the case, citing far more procedural mismanagement than anything detailed in the original decision: misdirected emails leading to extremely delayed notifications for US sport officials, which impacted their ability to prepare for the tribunal; missing file attachments; and a major source of conflict of interest on the three-person adjudication panel. 

But they also presented compelling evidence that challenged the official narrative 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 once before one minute had elapsed from the moment that Chiles’ floor score was posted in the arena. 

The four seconds that had seemed authoritative in the CAS decision seem much less so now. Or, at least, these seconds can be seen in a new light. They tell us when the inquiry intake officer inputted the challenge, not when it was proffered by the coach. A distinction with a very big difference as far as Chiles’ supporters are concerned. But what about the rules? The International Gymnastics Federation had this particular one on the books — 60 seconds to inquire for the final gymnast in a rotation — but what emerged from the hearing is that this was never strictly enforced, down to the second, because there was no mechanism to mark the precise time of the verbal inquiry.

The audio of this process after Chiles’ initial 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 matter how quickly Rupp or anyone else works, there will always be a small lag between the verbalizing of the inquiry 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 when the inquiry was entered into Omega’s system. In the CAS proceedings, Donatella Sacchi, the president of the women’s technical committee, said that when the inquiry was inputted, she received a notification on her tablet alerting her to it so she and the rest 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 element in question.

The Omega system, according to Chiles’ appeal, also did not contain any mechanisms to account for the lag between when a verbal inquiry 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 system that is supposedly unambiguous, in fact, offers its own possibility of doubt.

What was made clear in the testimony in front of the ad hoc tribunal was that there was actually no way for FIG to record the exact time that a verbal inquiry was submitted; the only thing the system, Omega or otherwise, can tell us is when it was manually inputted by an official.

“I felt pressure 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 quick enough [to] open up the files and get the process going.” 

Chiles’ overall appeal is based on two 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 hearing 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 one that Chiles’s legal team emphasized the most in their filing — is that one of the three CAS appointed jurists had an obvious conflict of interest in determining the outcome having done prior work for the country of Romania. 

Videos from NBC’s broadcast, a video team shooting the documentary on Simone Biles, and a broadcast from Olympic Broadcasting Services show Chiles’ coach verbally submitting the inquiry before the one-minute deadline as part of the evidence filing. Audio from these feeds clearly shows Cecile Canqueteau-Landi saying “inquiry” more than once between the 49 and 60 second marks.

The timestamped multiple feeds provide a new wrinkle in the supposed unambiguous log. It shows a new timeline that was not considered when determining the validity of the multiple claimants on the Paris 2024 women’s floor exercise bronze medal.

If these appeals make one thing clear, it’s that things like inquiries are just as much on the field of play as a sky high double somersault. A sport where every element 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 sport back, but the human. “This is because we’re not able to break our own prejudices because of our traditions,” he said about the women’s floor exercise final. “We need change. We need challenges. And we need the courage to move forward.”

Chiles’ appeals could drag out well beyond this year, as it did in the case of the 2022 Olympics team figure skating medalists. It took over two 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 special ceremony in Paris this summer.

Whether or not such proof — wherever it comes from — will sway the Swiss Federal Tribunal remains up in the air. But the evidence from the Olympics’ timekeeper was unambiguous, according to Zobrist. “No matter when the inquiry is done, the system would record a time,” he said. “The evidence is the log. So, the moment you push the button, that’s the logs that we get.” 

Yet, Omega’s log is now no longer the only timed piece of evidence that will determine how FIG’s rules get interpreted. Chiles’ legal team has provided video evidence that shows a new timeline, reintroducing ambiguity to the events that followed the floor exercise final.

We already have the ability to parse and dissect the sport of gymnastics on a granular level. But sometimes when we offer supposed clarity on the field of play, we create new complexities that we could not foresee with little mechanisms to enforce them.

In the end, this story comes down to timing. But it also 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 photo 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 measure time in infinitesimal increments and perceive minute differences in performance. But as the fiasco around the women’s floor 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.