We ask a lot of our Olympic athletes — to perform with grace and humility, to carry the Olympic spirit even as they pursue their own individual goals; to abide by the rules, and to accept their fates, however they may go, with dignity. Jordan Chiles has exemplified all of that in these Paris Olympic Games. Advertisement Is it so much to ask the people who hold her Olympic dreams in their hands to do the same? What is happening — and has happened — to Chiles and, by extension, Romania’s Ana Bǎrbosu, is a travesty of borderline technical malfeasance that has toyed with the emotions of two women who have done nothing wrong.
On Monday afternoon at Bercy Arena, Chiles finished her floor routine in the event final, scoring a 13.666, just out of reach of the 13.700 awarded to Bǎrbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea and off the medal podium.
Bǎrbosu, whose execution score was higher than her teammate’s, was awarded the bronze. Cecile Landi, Chiles’ coach, however, asked the judges to review the difficulty for one of the elements in Chiles’ floor routine. The request went ahead to the technical chair who agreed that, upon review, Chiles was not scored appropriately.
Immediately her 13.666 was upped to a 13.766.
She was the bronze medalist , not Bǎrbosu. While Chiles sobbed in joy and Simone Biles enveloped her in a bear hug, Bǎrbosu cried in agony, gutted by the review that demoted her to the dreaded fourth position. It was the Olympic experience writ large, in all o.