The 2024 Paris Olympics had everybody on their feet wondering who would win gold and if Team USA could secure it. A particular sport that everybody was watching and waiting for was Women’s Gymnastics. The American Women’s Gymnastics team always boasts many talented athletes, and this year’s team consisted of Simone Biles, Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles, Jade Carey and Hezly Rivera. However, an unprecedented situation during the scoring of the floor final shocked everybody, even the most dedicated American fans.
After everyone had performed their floor final in Paris, the scores came out and revealed that Romanian gymnast Ana Barbosa had scored 13.700. This meant she secured her spot for a bronze medal. However, USA gymnast Jordan Chiles finished with a 13.666. Even so, she believed that she was not rightly awarded all of the points according to the difficulty assigned to the moves that she had performed. Jordan Chiles is a 23-year-old gymnast for the USA and this would have been her first individual Olympic medal if she had received the correct difficulty points for her demonstrated skills.
The head USA coach, Cecille Landi, had put in an inquiry to adjust Chiles’ score to make sure that she was fully rewarded for the level of talent she displayed. This inquiry was approved by the judges and it added one-tenth of a point to Chiles’ score. Thanks to this, Chiles’ score was increased to 13.766, which allowed her to take third place from the Romanian gymnast. This caused an upset with the Romanian Olympic Committee. The committee looked into the inquiry to discover that Landi had sent in the inquiry four seconds after the one-minute limit for valid inquiries.
The Olympics had announced the bronze medal going to Chiles, but a few days later announced that they revoked her medal due to the inquiry being late. This news quickly created an uproar, especially on social media, about how Chiles deserved that bronze medal and how it should not have mattered that the inquiry was four seconds late. Some Americans are unbothered by this discrepancy while others are enraged. Today, Chiles is still fighting this battle with the Swiss supreme court to bring home her very own bronze medal. The USA women’s gymnast did fantastic overall obtaining gold medals for the whole team. This was an event that has never happened before and shines a light on women’s gymnastics in the Olympics.
