U.S. gymnast Jordan Chiles may have to return the bronze medal she won at the 2024 Paris Olympics after the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled in favor of an appeal filed by the Romanian gymnastics team.
During the women’s floor exercise final on Monday, Aug. 5, Chiles initially earned a score of 13.666, which placed her fifth, right behind Romania’s Ana Barbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea.
The two Romanian gymnasts finished with matching scores of 13.700; Barbosu thought she had secured the bronze via a tiebreaker — a higher execution score. However, U.
S. coach Cecile Canqueteau-Landi filed an on-floor appeal, arguing that the score was incorrect due to the routine’s level of difficulty. The judges agreed and adjusted Chiles’ score by 0.
1, which was enough to surpass Barbosu and Maneca-Voinea. After the medal ceremony, the Romanian team filed its own appeal, noting that Team USA’s appeal occurred outside the one-minute time limit to question the judges’ scores. CAS agreed with the Romanians’ point about the time limit, finding that Team USA’s appeal came one minute and four seconds after Chiles’ score was posted.
(By rule, because Chiles was the final athlete to compete on the event, her coaches had just one minute to file the inquiry, while the rest of the field had until the score of the following gymnast was shown to make their verbal appeal.) Therefore, the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) restored the original scoring following the cou.