Famous Olympian Simone Biles may be stripped of gold medal due to scoring investigation

The floor exercise final at the Paris Olympics was an even bigger mess than people realized. Newly uncovered video evidence, filed Monday as part of Jordan Chiles' appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal, documents that a scoring inquiry for Simone Biles was never processed during the floor final. That almost surely cost Biles a gold medal. She finished just 0.033 points behind Brazil's Rebeca Andrade. It meant Biles had to take silver.

Biles' score of 14.133 included a 6.9 for difficulty. If she'd gotten full credit for her split leap, she would have added another 0.10 points onto that difficulty score, bringing her to a 14.233 and propelling her past Andrade's 14.166.

It shows Biles turning to her coach, Cecile Landi, and asking, "Is he asking?" to which Landi responds with, "He said he did." A short exchange in French between Cecile and her husband, Laurent Landi, where Cecile then turns to Biles and says, "They didn't send it," while raising her arms in frustration.

Landi then addresses Chiles as she asks her husband, "What about Jordan? You want to try?"

The video was given to Chiles by the director Katie Walsh and Religion of Sports, a production company working on Biles' documentary, 'Simone Biles: Rising'. Two episodes came out on Netflix before the 2024 Paris Olympics. More will be released later this year.

Landi did file an inquiry for Chiles, arguing that she wasn't fully credited for her split leap. The review panel agreed, upping Chiles' score 0.10 points, which was enough to slip her into the bronze medal position over Romania's Ana Barbosu.

However, Romania appealed to CAS, arguing that the inquiry had come too late. CAS agreed, citing data that showed the inquiry by Chiles was logged four seconds past the deadline, commanding the changing of results. In the process, on the last day of the Olympics, Chiles was stripped of her bronze medal.

But the kicker is this: those regulations state only that a verbal inquiry must be completed, not that an inquiry must be recorded. In fact, during hearings in front of the CAS, the FIG even acknowledged they didn't have a system to record when verbal inquiries were made.

In the video, Landi can be heard saying, "Inquiry for Jordan," twice, before the 60 seconds was up.

The wildest part, though, is how Biles genuinely looked more upset about Chiles losing her bronze than she was about missing out on another gold herself.

Source: USA Today
Scoring inquiry errors might have cost Simone Biles another Olympic gold medal