The awarding of the bronze medal in the women’s floor exercise by Jordan Chiles to Romanian Ana Bǎrbosu was the big topic this Sunday morning.
This seems to put an end to the confusion about the conclusion of the event on Monday.
Immediately after the competition ended with Chiles’ routine, Bărbosu thought she had won the bronze medal after achieving a score of 13.700. Chiles had originally achieved a score of 13.666, but her coaches successfully challenged the difficulty rating, which increased her score by 0.1 and put her in third place, behind gold medalist Rebeca Andrade and American Simone Biles.
After the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled on Saturday that the United States’ first inquiry into Chiles’ result in the floor exercise final was submitted after the one-minute deadline on Monday, the Romanian Gymnastics Federation (RGF) said: “With one eye we laugh, with the other we cry.”
“Congratulations to our two gymnasts on this special result at the Olympic Games in Paris!” said RGF lawyer Sabin Gherdan in a statement.
Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu had previously stated that he would refuse to attend the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in protest against the women’s floor exercise final.
Ciolacu said in a statement on Wednesday that Bǎrbosu and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea were treated “absolutely dishonorably” by the judges in the floor final. Bǎrbosu had surprisingly missed out on a medal, while Maneca-Voinea received a 0.1 point penalty for leaving the floor mat, even though it did not appear as if she had actually stepped across the playing surface.
“It is unacceptable that in a competition of this magnitude, which promotes values such as respect, understanding and excellence, a girl who has honestly won her medal is brutally deprived of the result of her four years of work! I could not look at her tears and calmly accept that this is completely normal!”
He added: “And the fact that hundreds of millions of viewers from all over the world were shocked by this terrible scene, just like us Romanians, shows that somewhere in the system of organizing this competition there is something wrong.”
