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The International Federation of Gymnastics has disclosed that Korean gymnast Yang Tae-young's parallel bar event scoring was misjudged and reprimanded judges involved. This is tantamount to officially recognizing Yang, the bronze medal winner, as a factual gold medalist. Because of judges' erroneous scoring of Yang's parallel bar event in the degree of difficulty, Yang sustained a loss of at least 0.1 point, it has been disclosed. If so, the gold medal American gymnast Paul Hamm took away at 0.049 point ahead of Yang should be returned to Yang, needless to say.
But on account of its own rule that "a written protest must be filed within 15 minutes after an event is closed," the IFG insists "the order cannot be reversed." The federation made an issue of the fact that a group of Korean coaches, fearing possible disadvantage during the remainder of the whole event, filed a protest after the event was over, but the IFG judgment can hardly be regarded to be fair and honorable.
On several occasions, medal awards were reversed due to disclosures of errors in judgment, even if neither protests nor suits were filed against Olympic rulings. When a French judge made a declaration of conscience that a Russian figure skating team was given the gold medal in the 2002 winter Olympics because she gave it points higher than it was worth, the International Federation of Skating immediately made the silver medalist Canadian team a joint gold medalist.
American media and people are ashamed of the gymnastics scoring scandal. A sense of shame is hidden in this report of the New York Times, which said Hamm has become the first American male who has won the gold medal in the Olympic men's gymnastics all-around event, a medal he should not have received. In a USA Today Internet edition poll, 97 percent of the respondents called for correcting the order, 84 percent said that "Yang should receive the gold medal, and Hamm the silver medal," and 8.7 percent said, "Hamm should be deprived of the gold medal."
Had the victim of the wrong scoring been a gymnastics power or a major sports power, what attitude the IFG would have taken, we wonder. Since the gymnastics federation, an institution managing the event and a body responsible for it, has disclosed the details of the issue and recognized its error, it is logical for the federation to return the gold medal to the athlete who entitled to it. That's is a way according with the Olympic spirit to materialize justice and harmony through sports.
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