The Hindu : Sport : Hamm puts forward his case

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Sep 28, 2004

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Sport - Sports : General

Hamm puts forward his case

LAUSANNE, SEPT. 27. Paul Hamm appeared before the sports world's highest court on Monday to argue why he should he keep his Olympic gymnastics gold medal.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport convened to hear the appeal from a South Korean gymnast who believes he was unfairly deprived of the gold in the men's all-around event in Athens last month because of a scoring error.

Yang Tae-young wants CAS to order international gymnastics officials to reorder the rankings and give him the gold medal and Hamm the silver. But Hamm and the U.S. Olympic Committee promise to fight Yang's appeal as vigorously as the South Korean has battled in his quest for the gold.

"That's why we're all here, to keep the medal," Hamm told Associated Press Television News as he arrived in Switzerland. "After it's all done, hopefully the medal will stay with me."

A panel of three arbitrators will hear the appeal at CAS headquarters in Lausanne in a closed hearing. It's not known how soon they will render a decision.

CAS scheduled a one-day hearing on the case. It might take two weeks before a verdict is announced.

Yang mistakenly was docked 0.1 points for the level of difficulty in his parallel bars routine. If Yang had received the proper score, he would have finished 0.051 points ahead of Hamm, although that assumes everything in the final rotation would have played out the same way.

"The issue is whether this affected the result," CAS general secretary Matthieu Reeb said. "We hope the decision will be made in the next two weeks," Reeb said.

FIG's stand

Even though the International Gymnastics Federation, known as FIG, acknowledged the error and suspended the judges, it said repeatedly it wouldn't change the results because the South Koreans didn't file a protest in time.

And even if the protest had been filed in time, Hamm's supporters say an error by judges shouldn't have caused such a maelstrom.

USA Gymnastics president Bob Colarossi said the competition should have been considered closed the night the results were published. "It's a bad precedent to look at field-of-play calls in court," he said. "There's a human element in sport. There are always going to be some things that happen that on review might have gone differently."

CAS traditionally does not involve itself in `field-of-play decisions,' such as the scoring error that caused all these problems, but Yang had nowhere else to go. The U.S. Olympic Committee rebuffed its South Korean counterpart's plea for Hamm's medal.

New rules

FIG's executive committee is recommending new rules in response to Hamm's case, including immediate suspension of up to four years for judges who make scoring mistakes and adoption of a new scoring system.

"The code of points must be totally revised," FIG spokesman Philippe Silacci told The Associated Press on Monday. — AP

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