COMMENTARY

By Steve Wilstein

AP columnist

updated 10:33 a.m. ET Aug. 26, 2004

ATHENS, Greece - A grand judging goof at the Athens Olympics cheapened American gymnast Paul Hamm’s historic gold and gave South Korea another good reason to cry robbery at the games.

The latest fiasco in one of the Olympics’ glamour events has none of the shady mob characters and intrigue of the figure-skating judging scandal in Salt Lake City.

It has none of the nuance of the speedskating decision that disqualified a South Korean at the same 2002 Games, handed the 1,500-meter gold to American Apolo Anton Ohno, and raised millions of hackles in Seoul.

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Here we have human error, not deceit or interpretation, or so it seems as this tale of bungled scoring on the parallel bars unravels.

What’s clear on the surface — that South Korean Yang Tae-young should have won the all-around gold, not bronze, and Hamm should have gotten silver — is murkier in the details.

And before the International Olympic Committee or the International Gymnastics Federation takes a wayward step down the slippery slope of switching medals or awarding a second gold, let’s warn straight out: Don’t do it.

There’s more at stake in this decision than one gold or two.

Judges are fallible, even if they’re not often corrupt. They make mistakes, large and small, in every Olympics. Errors, especially when there’s no skullduggery, have to be settled during the event, not retroactively. Rewriting results every time there’s a dispute will lead only to chaos and constant protests.

The International Skating Union, under pressure from the IOC, set an ill-advised precedent in Salt Lake City by ordering extra gold for the Canadian pairs skaters to match the ones awarded to the Russian pair. That scandal involved French officials who may have been influenced by a Russian mobster to fix the event, though no proof was found.

Yang and South Korea have every reason to feel victimized. The gymnastics federation studied the tape and on Saturday acknowledged the screwup. Three judges were suspended. The Americans sympathized.

But that’s as far as it should go, even if South Korea is pressing for retribution before the Court of Arbitration for Sport and protesters in Seoul are mounting a campaign vilifying the Games in general and Americans in particular.

There is a question, too, in this case of whether South Korean gymnastics officials should share some of the blame. Did they catch the scoring error immediately and demand it be corrected during the competition? The federation, known as FIG, said it didn’t. The South Koreans said they did and were told to file a protest letter after the meet.

It may take the court to straighten it out.

No one disputes that the judges gave Yang an incorrect “start value,” which is determined by the level of difficulty, on his parallel bars routine in the finals. It should have been 10, as it was for the same routine in qualifying. Instead, he received a 9.9.

FIG officials said that with the proper start value, Yang would have finished with 57.874 points and beaten Hamm by 0.051. Hamm would have won the silver, rather than becoming the first American man to win the event, and South Korea’s Kim Dae-eun would have received the bronze instead of silver.

“We want obvious mistakes to be corrected,” said Jae Soon-yoo, an official with the South Korean delegation.

If the South Koreans knew there was a mistake right away, they should have protested strongly at that time.

Instead, the gymnasts moved on to the high bar and Yang messed up there with a 9.475 to fall from first to third while Hamm produced a stunning 9.837 to leap from 12th place to first.

“Judges can make mistakes. That’s human,” federation spokesman Philippe Silacci said. “But it’s like football. They cannot change the score once the game is over.”

It’s a fair analogy because things like that happen in football and other sports all the time. International gymnastics does not have instant replay, as the sport does in the United States, though perhaps after this it should.

USA Gymnastics president Bob Colarossi, knowing how different he would have felt in the reverse situation, offered sympathy that will be of little solace in Seoul.

Pressian.com, an Internet-based newspaper in South Korea, urged “a strong nationwide reaction to reclaim the gold medal that we have been robbed of.”

In the United States, Hamm’s gold, his reputation, and his marketability will not be tarnished in the least by this affair. Americans probably won’t remember it beyond next week. South Koreans won’t forget it for a long time.

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