OAN Staff Abril Elfi
2:57 PM – Wednesday, September 11, 2024
American gymnast Jordan Chiles said her “skin color” was part of the reason she lost her Olympic medal, which was intertwined in controversy. She sobbed in her first interview since she lost the bronze medal.
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The Olympian gave her first sit-down interview since the Paris Olympics during a panel at the Forbes Power Women Summit 2024 on Wednesday.
The controversy comes after Ana Barbosu from Romania’s team had initially finished with a higher score than Chiles. However, after judges reviewed Chiles’ footage, they changed her score which bumped the American to third place.
Nonetheless, on the last day of the Olympics, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled that Chiles’s appeal was submitted after the one-minute deadline, and it changed her score, dropping her back to fifth place. The following day, on August 11th, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruled that Chiles must return the medal.
When asked about the topic during her interview, the gymnast began sobbing and said her “skin color” was part of the reason she lost.
“To me, everything that has gone on is not about the medal, it’s about, you know, my skin color,” Chiles said.
In a statement posted to X on August 15th, Chiles claimed she was facing “racially driven attacks” from social media users. Chiles’s bronze medal resulted in the first gymnastics podium in Olympic history to feature three black competitors.
“It’s about the fact that there were things that have led up to this position of being an athlete and I felt like everything has been stripped.”
Chiles then compared the incident to a period in her career in 2018, when she had just graduated from high school, made her senior international debut, and was working toward her goal of competing in the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. Despite her success, Chiles admitted she “lost the love of the sport” that year as a result of an “abusive coach,” whom she did not name.
“I felt like back in 2018 when I did lose the love of the sport. I’ve lost it again. I just did felt like there wasn’t a lot of people supporting me who I thought could support me in that situation. I felt like I was really left in the dark,” she said.
“I was in a situation of dealing with the coach, who emotionally and verbally abused me. I didn’t have the ability to use my voice or be heard,” Chiles said.
Chiles previously discussed the unnamed abusive coach on an episode of “Peace of Mind with Taraji” on Facebook Watch in November 2021. Chiles claimed her previous coach would “call [her] fat.”
“She said I looked like a donut” and was “constantly criticizing what [I] ate,” Chiles claimed. She switched trainers in 2019 and began training at the World Gymnastics Centre in Texas, which is owned by Simone Biles’s family.
As of now, Chiles still reels from the loss of her Olympic bronze, which she has not returned despite being ordered to by the IOC. Chiles stubbornly claims the medal is rightfully hers.
“I made history and I will always continue to make history, it’s something I rightfully did, I followed the rules, my coach followed the rules, we did everything that was totally and completely right,” Chiles said.
After the Olympics ended in August, USA Today reported that Chiles and the rest of the U.S. Olympic team had “no intention” of returning the medal and were still appealing the IOC decision.
Biles told People later that month that she has joined the effort to appeal the decision and reinstate Chiles as the third-place finisher.
“Do we think they did the correct procedures to come to this ruling? No,” Biles said. “That’s really why we want that justice for Jordan and why we’re going to keep supporting her and uplifting her.”
The controversy brought scrutiny on the judges that scored the event.
On August 15th, The Center of Arbitration for Sport’s (CAS) and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) released a joint statement condemning the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) and the judging crew for the outcome.
“If the FIG had put such a mechanism or arrangement in place, a great deal of heartache would have been avoided,” the CAS’ ad-hoc panel said in a release. “The Panel expresses the hope that the FIG will draw the consequences of this case, in relation to these three extraordinary Athletes and also for other Athletes and their supporting personnel, in the future, so that this never happens again.”
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