Dissecting the Jordan Childs Controversy: Unpacking the Gymnastics Scoring System and Judges’ Errors

Just real quick on the Jordan Childs thing. And this has been bothering me the most about this whole thing. Maybe not the most, but it’s something that’s really irking me, which is that the deduction that Jordan Childs received to not win the bronze medal originally was wrong, right? Like I think a lot of people think that gymnastics is scored like, oh, I liked that. I’m gonna give it a nice score. That’s not how it works. I’m begging of you. If you don’t understand gymnastics scoring, it’s actually not that difficult if you go and read through it, especially with difficulty scores. It’s up to the judges to like make sure that they understand what moves were executed or whatever. But like there isn’t, there’s no wiggle room to say like, I don’t wanna give them this. Like it’s supposed to be pretty standard, which is why there’s something to challenge, right? So what her coach did was essentially a coach’s challenge. Hey, I don’t think this call was right. You need to go back and look at this. And her coach said, you know, it’s definitely a crap shoot, but it’s always worth a try. Just like with anything else, throwing a flag, issuing a coach’s challenge, it’s worth a try, right? And the, you gotta have, you know, generally a preponderance of evidence. We talk about all the time how it’s like better to call the touchdown and then have to call it back then to award a touchdown after, right? Cause you need more evidence to actually award it than you do to take it away. You always want the call on the field, right? So it’s on the judges to have the difficulty score set and then deduct based on that from there, right? So everybody starts at like, okay, your highest difficulty score, let’s say is a 6.2 and then 10ths, two 10ths, three 10ths, depending on what kind of mistakes or moves left out or not fully executed go on within the routine. So what they did was they deducted a 10th that never should have been deducted. They went back and said, yup, it turns out there’s a 10th in the routine that was deducted from her that shouldn’t have been. So she always had the bronze medal score. This isn’t a situation where the Romanians are challenging that she actually won the bronze medal. They’re challenging whether or not her coach got the challenge in time four seconds difference. Now, obviously the US has submitted evidence. I don’t know where they got this evidence, but they found video that shows that her coach was able to submit the request within 47 seconds, which is like already insane that you have to submit within a minute, especially under those circumstances. But okay, it’s the Olympics. Okay, the Olympic judges in the final routine of the entire gymnastics competition at the Olympics screwed up bad enough that they awarded the wrong gymnast the bronze medal at first. They had to correct that. There are no ones going back and saying that Jordan Child’s score was actually lower. So regardless, if the Romanian gymnast were to be awarded her bronze medal, it would be a consolation prize. It would be a moral victory. She did not get the score that was high enough to actually win the bronze medal. This would be on a technicality at best. And like to me, that’s just kind of gross, especially for Jordan Childs, who was enduring already a bunch of racist attacks and insults and everything else, all black podium, really historic, really meaningful to a bunch of people around the world. And this is all over four potential seconds of whether or not it was submitted in time. Like this is dumb. And it’s fully and entirely on the judges to begin with. Like I’m not saying people can’t make mistakes. We know this, but why would the gymnasts have to pay the price for that? This is a situation that should have been figured out at the time. Like at the time before anyone got on a podium, this should have been litigated. Litigating this after the fact, especially considering Jordan Childs score is not being questioned, the timing of the submission of the challenges being questioned. This feels very much like frustration with the Americans and the American gymnasts more than it is anything else. I don’t know how else to put it. It just, they’ve been dominating podiums for a really long time. And that’s fine. Be sick of it, be frustrated. But the way these committees have handled this is like, it’s just gross.