The Hindu : Sport / Olympic Games : Officials Hamm it up

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Wednesday, Aug 25, 2004

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Sport - Olympic Games

Officials Hamm it up

By George Vecsey

ATHENS, AUG. 24. Gymnastics officials walk around with badges on their jackets that enable them to watch the competition up close and partake of the hospitality in the VIP section.

Paul Hamm wears neither a badge nor a jacket. It is not his place to make decisions regarding the rules and regulations of his very complicated sport. He's a kid who competes.

With not much else to do, the officials with the badges and jackets botched the competition, and now they have botched the review, leaving a 21-year-old gymnast all alone to face the yowling mob and news media.

Because of the lack of leadership in gymnastics, Hamm is facing pressure to offer to share the gold medal with a South Korean gymnast who may have been hurt by a scoring error.

As the gymnastics competition ended on Monday night, Hamm had to field questions while Bruno Grandi, the president of the International Gymnastics Federation, ran and hid. Grandi did put out word that it would be nice if Hamm turned back his medal, but he did not have the character to clarify this in public, nor did his spokesman.

This is the kind of smarmy conduct that makes me yearn for the high-minded types of professional sports back home. George Steinbrenner, Don King, Mark Cuban, Al Davis — you can find them.

But when the gymnastics competition ended in noise and controversy, the officials from the FIG, as the federation is known, scrammed out into the Athenian night.

Disgraceful mess

This disgraceful mess goes back to last Wednesday, when Hamm was awarded a gold medal in the all-around competition. Two days later, the South Koreans claimed that their man, Yang Tae -young, had been harmed because two officials rated him by a 9.9 difficulty curve rather than the 10.0 figure he merited. The federation agreed and suspended the two officials and their supervisor, leaving Hamm dangling during the rest of the competition.

Monday night there was a vicious demonstration from the crowd when a popular Russian gymnast, Alexei Nemov, got whacked by judges after a stirring performance on the high bar. The crowd whistled and jeered for nearly 10 minutes while Hamm waited to compete.

Hamm managed to ride out the demonstration, which was far uglier than the one by skating fans over the fraudulent decision in Salt Lake City in 2002 by the woman now known as the French Judge.

For all that, Hamm managed to gain a silver medal on Monday night, losing to Igor Cassina of Italy in a tiebreaker. He earned that medal, as he had earned his previous gold, which he is not giving back.

``I truly believe in my heart that I am the all-around champion,'' Hamm said late on Monday night.

Yang Tae-young has reason to feel he was hurt by the judges' mistake. He has every right to petition for a gold medal or a second gold medal. That is up to the people with the badges and jackets. It is not up to Paul Hamm.

No authority

The gymnastics federation says it has no authority in its rules to go back over the mistake. The international sports court has already said it does not deal with mistakes made on the field of play — and hurrah for that.

The last thing the drug-ridden, money-driven, pressure-packed world of sports needs is any court overturning officiating mistakes.

The U.S. Olympic Committee and the Korean committee have tried to broker an arrangement in which Yang would receive a duplicate gold medal.

But Hamm was not going for it, and neither is the national federation. ``If the referee makes a mistake in a football game, do you change the score?'' asked Bob Colarossi, the president of USA Gymnastics.

Colarossi was right in his basic premise, but he gave differing versions of negotiations going on between the USOC and the South Koreans.

Duplicate medals

Duplicate gold medals are coming back to haunt the International Olympic Committee, which awarded one to a Canadian synchronized swimmer because of a scoring mistake in 1992 and then awarded two more to Canadian figure skaters after the judging scandal in 2002. When Dr. Jacques Rogge of the IOC brokered the gold medals in Salt Lake City, the Russian pair did not complain.

They undoubtedly knew the system was rotten in the first place, but they also train and perform in the United States, and knew there were benefits to being a good sport.

Hamm has no such incentive. In the glaring absence of leadership in his sport, there is no reason Hamm should start making gestures. He doesn't have a badge and a jacket.

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