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This is the best article I've read explaining the Paul Hamm Gold Medal situation. How many football games have been won or lost by bad officiating? It's part of the game. Hamm keeps the Gold, he won it fair and square.

Replies: 2 Comments

on Wednesday, August 25th, Vampire Elf said

In the interest of time (mine) and glazed eyes (eveyone else's except Raul) I'll say this:

I agree with much of what Raul says, except I don't agree with "we have a pretty good idea" of what would have happened. Nah, we have no idea. He could've slipped, the 4 grabs could have been noticed, or he could have dominated. No one knows or will they ever know. Which is the point of the article. The judges screwed up, the coaches followed the screw-up with another one, and Hamm one. That probably is a very US-centric way of looking at things, but it's also the rules of the Olympic games - hence the decision to not change the standings.

I guess if you gotta tag it with an asterisk (and fairly, it would be rather ridiculous to recount the story without mention of this part of the escapade), go ahead, but it's a lot different then 61*, where more games were actually played.

on Wednesday, August 25th, Raul Groom said

Well, OK. Honestly, on some level, I agree with the overall thrust of the piece - that Paul Hamm should keep his gold medal, and a second one should not be awarded. However, we've got a real good example in this debate of the unequal burden of proof that gets dictated by people's emotions.

This article is, in a word, flimsy. If someone wrote an article this thin arguing the opposite position, it would be torn apart. But people REALLY want Paul Hamm's gold medal not to have an asterisk next to it, because the way he won it was so exciting. Let's go through and look at the arguments the columnist uses.

Right off the bat, we get the most common and most irresponsible technique in opinion journalism - "Some people have said some crazy shit that is wrong, and I'm going to tell you what's right."

We get not one name of a person who was made the argument in question. We get no treatment of any reasoning they have raised; only a blanket smear that these folks "wouldn't know a handstand from a nightstand."

The first piece of actual information is the irrelevant fact that 9.712 on P-bars is "a pretty good score," and that Young received a lower score on an earlier routine. This has no conceivable relevance to the situation in question. It's just laying an emotional foundation for the idea that Young should be happy with his bronze.

Everything Swift says about the "mental outlook" thing is true, but it only goes to show why the result can't be changed, not why it is fundamentally correct. Which, unfortunately irrectifiably, it plainly isn't.

There are disagreements over start values fairly often. However, they are usually corrected, as they were in the preliminaries, in time to make things right. The fact that the start value was assigned incorrectly and not corrected at the biggest moment in men's gymnastics is a major scandal and a big-time embarrassment for the judges. It has also, unfortunately, cast a shadow over Paul Hamm's gold medal.

The final point made, about how if you go to the tape, you can find additional errors, is also completely irrelevant. The deductions are supposed to be a judgment call; the start value is not. That's why you can appeal a start value - you can't appeal a deduction.

In the final analysis, of course, Paul Hamm won the gold medal, and there is nothing that can be done about it. The final blame, really, lies with the South Korean coaching staff, not with Yang or Hamm. And it's true that no one knows for sure what would have happened if Yang had been awarded the correct score.

But we have a pretty good idea. There is some chance that Yang would have relaxed with a lead, or that he would have choked, but in reality it’s unlikely he would have scored much lower than the 9.475 that he received on high bar – his lowest score of the competition.

It’s also true that, assuming Yang did no better and no worse, Hamm would have known that he needed a 9.937 on his final routine to win gold, but such a score is almost impossible. No one scored that high on any apparatus at any time during the entire competition; in fact Hamm’s winning 9.837 was the best score anyone got on high bar all night.

The fact is, as much as we might hate to admit it, if the judges hadn’t screwed up, Paul Hamm would almost certainly not be the Olympic champion. Fortunately for him, they did screw up, and Hamm got the gold. But an honest recounting of how Hamm got that gold will always include an elementary judging error, and that’s the sign – indeed the very definition - of the dreaded asterisk.

Finally, let me point out that using football as an example is a peculiarly U.S.-centric way of looking at things. In what the rest of the world calls football, if a clearly wrong ruling, or even an unsportsmanlike play – decides a match, the game is sometimes replayed. In any case, the defining terrible call in American football – Colorado being awarded a “fifth down” so that they could defeat Missouri – was never reversed, but the national title Colorado won that year is widely considered the most tarnished championship in the history of sports.

So in the end, we can all agree that Paul Hamm should keep his gold medal, and that he’s the Olympic Champion. There are those for whom that is obviously not enough, who need to know that what happened was not only just but right, but on that score, those folks are in the wrong. Paul Hamm holds a diminished gold medal. Sad, but true.