USA gymnast Jordan Chiles is fighting tooth-and-nail to get her Olympic bronze medal back after a Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling back in August overturned her score inquiry from the 2024 Paris Olympics and dropped her from third place to fifth in the final standings.
Chiles appealed the CAS’ original decision last week with the Swiss Federal Tribunal, and this week she took a few more steps to make sure she exhausts every possible option to get her medal back.
The latest development emerged this week when two new appeals were filed with the Swiss Supreme Court — one by Chiles and another by USA Gymnastics — asking the court to require the CAS to reopen its original case and allow the video and audio clips provided, which clearly show Chiles’ score inquiry was submitted on time, to be used evidence, thus forcing the CAS to overturn its decision.
“The evidence in question — footage from a documentary crew that was recording the women’s gymnastics floor finals — proves that CAS’s prior decision rested on a critical factual error that was compounded by the fact that CAS allowed Chiles less than a day to prepare for her.
“CAS stripped Chiles’ bronze medal based on its conclusion that Chiles’ coach was four seconds late in making a verbal inquiry to correct Chiles’ score, but the new evidence clearly shows that the inquiry was made on time.”
There is a difference in the two appeals filed.
Chiles’ original appeal is two-fold. She asked the SFT to reinstate her original score of 13.766 because the CAS violated her right to be heard during that appeal process by not allowing the video evidence that proved her score inquiry was submitted on time.
She also claimed she had no real chance of winning that appeal due to the conflict of interest involving Hamid G. Gharavi, the chair of the CAS panel. Gharavi was an active member of Romania’s legal counsel at the time of the hearing, and he stripped Chiles of the medal to award it to Romanian Ana Barbosu.
Chiles’ second appeals are petitioning the Swiss Supreme Court to force CAS to reopen its case and reconsider the new audio and video evidence, which it declined to do the first time around.
