I still don’t understand what happened. Something about something happening 4 seconds late? But why was her medal challenged in the first place?
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Several things happened.
Gymnastics scoring has two basic components- a difficulty score, where more difficult moves are worth more points, and an execution score, based on how well they perform the intended moves. The judges made an error in their scoring calculation for part of her routine, where they did not use the correct difficulty score. If they had used the correct score, she would have placed 3rd. Her coaches realized this and protested the result. They were initially successful in their protest, and Jordan was awarded the bronze.
Her opponents coaches then appealed the protest under a rules violation. There is a set amount of time from the score being announced that you have to protest. Once the deadline has past, you may no longer protest, even if you were right. Jordan’s coach’s protest was overturned because they missed the deadline by 4 seconds.
Her coaches then appealed the appeal, but were not successful.
Jordan Chiles missed the medal by a slight margin. Her coaches appealed the score arguing that the judges underscored the difficulty of one of the parts of her routine. The judges reviewed the routine and adjusted her technical score which moved her into the medal position. The team which originally medaled appealed the appeal arguing that the initial appeal was requested too late and should have not been considered. The scoring committee sided with the now fourth place finisher that the initial appeal was invalid and restored Jordan Chiles’ initial score which dropped her to fourth place and stripped her of the medal.
The scoring for her floor routine initially put her in 4th place. Her coach felt that her floor routine was improperly judged and submitted an inquiry (apparently, a pretty standard practice), which was successful and raised her score enough to put her into 3rd for the bronze medal.
The Romanian team filed an appeal, saying the inquiry was submitted four seconds past the one-minute deadline for submitting the inquiry. USA Gymnastics says they have video showing it was submitted at 47 seconds, but the Court of Arbitration of Sport said they consider the matter closed and would not reevaluate the situation.
Ok, so a brief history is needed here to put this into context and make it easier to understand. Back in the day, gymnastics was always scored on an “execution” score, where each judge would score the routine with a score of 0-10.
This worked for most of the history of the sport, then around the late 90s/early 2000s, some gymnasts would be trying to really push the sport by doing harder routines. However if they made a mistake, they would score lower than someone who did an easier routine and didn’t make a mistake. So then there’s a question, is it better to do a harder routine, knowing you might mess up and get a lower score than someone who does an easy routine with no mistakes?
To fix this, in 2006, the international gymnastics federation decided to change the scoring, and add in a “difficulty score”. This difficulty score was determined based on how hard the routine was. There was still the execution score of 0-10. So how, a gymnasts score would be the sum of those two. So if a gymnast does a much harder routine, they can make a small mistake and score higher than someone who does an easy routine flawlessly.
That said, for something like a vault, a difficulty score is easy to calculate, it’s just based on how many flips and twists the person does, and maybe some minor modifiers for how they start (re: adding more for a flip into the springboard). For longer routines though like balance beam, floor exercise bars, etc, it’s harder, because some of the difficulty comes from stringing together components. Re: maybe doing a double/double on a floor tumbling run would add .5 to the difficulty, and doing a single flip would add .1, but doing a double/double and then a single flip immediately after adds a .7. However, this means that if a gymnast messes up somewhere in there, like say they go wild on the double/double and don’t end up doing the single flip after, then instead of just losing .1 for difficulty for not doing the single flip they lose .2 because it was stringing them together. Also, what if it was just supposed to be that double/double, but instead they only did a one and a half/double. There needs to be adjustment to the difficulty.
So now all of the judges initially gather before doing their execution scores to all agree on a difficulty score. This must be unanimous before anything can continue. Then they do the execution score, then the sum of those is announced.
Sometimes, the judges get it wrong. They might not count something correctly especially if some judges say they saw an extra twist, but others say they didn’t, it will usually end up being a majority win sort of thing. But if a gymnast believes the difficulty score (and difficulty score only mind you, they can’t appeal an execution score) they can appeal the difficulty score and say “nah, that difficulty should be 5.6 not 5.5!!”. If they appeal, the judges will meet again to decide if they are right and possibly alter the score. One thing though, they don’t want this appeal lingering, because they want the competition to continue, and they can’t let the next gymnast go until that score is completely final. So they said that the appeal can only be placed within 1 minute of the score being announced.
Now onto Jordan Chiles, on the floor exercise final, she did a routine that she has done many, many times, that has always scored a 6.2 for difficulty. She did the routine without missing anything, so the difficulty should have been 6.2. However, when the score was announced, they only gave her a 6.1. Her coach went down to appeal. The judges changed the difficulty to a 6.2. This score ended up being high enough for her to win the bronze medal.
After the medal ceremony though, Romania complained to some higher authority (admittedly I don’t know how this process works) and showed evidence from the TV broadcast that Jordan Chiles coach didn’t appeal within 1 minute, her appeal came in at 1 minute and 4 seconds after the score was announced. This committee reviewed the evidence and agreed. So the 6.2 difficulty score was officially changed back to a 6.1, which lowered Chiles score which meant Romanian gymnast Ana Barbosu was now scoring higher than her.
There was several more appeals on both sides ultimately being decided after Chiles has already gone home with the medal, so the IOC is saying she has to return the medal.
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