When U.S. gymnast Aly Raisman completed her routine on the balance beam during the individual finals Tuesday, she hugged her coach and stared at the scoreboard, waiting to see whether she had done enough to medal.
When the score finally flashed, a nervous Raisman became disappointed.
"Oh, no!" her coach, Mihai Brestyan, proclaimed as he spotted the eerily familiar results.
She had landed in fourth place – again – and just shy of the medal stand for the second time in the Olympics.
What happened next would again thrust the judges, athletes and coaches into a heated debate over Olympic scoring.
As Raisman tried to hold back her disappointment, shouts came from the crowd. U.S. national team coordinator Martha Karolyi, her husband, Bela (who is no longer associated with Team USA but is a constant fixture), and vice president of USA women's gymnastics Kathy Kelly shouted and motioned for Brestyan to file a protest.
They believed that the judges hadn't accurately tabulated her difficulty score, specifically the connections between a few of her elements on the beam. Brestyan raced around the gym to get a form to fill out in the allotted time. Meanwhile, Raisman congratulated Catalina Ponor of Romania, who was in position for bronze.
Raisman and Team USA anxiously stared at the scoreboard as judges from the International Gymnastics Federation reviewed video of her routine.
"It might be a tie," Raisman said: a repeat of the all-around finals. Raisman had tied Russia's Aliya Mustafina, which in the all-around means the lowest score was dropped. Raisman, long seen as the rock of the team, had narrowly missed an individual medal because of the tiebreaker rule. She was worried it would happen again.
And Raisman was right, it was a tie. But her coach quickly reminded her she would end up on the podium because the execution scores alone, not the difficulty, were judged in the tiebreaker.
The scoreboard flashed the official result. The tiebreaker went in Raisman's favor this time, and she received a bronze medal.
It was perhaps one of the longest moments of Raisman's career. But it was not the first time this chaotic scene had played out in the Olympics - or questions about the accuracy of judging had come up.
For years, debate has stirred about how accurately sports can be judged, especially in the Olympics. Many have argued that everything is subjective. And in a sport that comes down to hundredths of a point, that can be everything. As Raisman knows, it can also be the difference between being an Olympic medalist and missing out entirely.
That is part of the reason the inquiry system Raisman's coach used was instituted.
"The inquiry was introduced along with FIG's new scoring system following the 2004 Olympics, where judging disasters marred the men's all-around and high bar finals. (The inquiry replaced an appeals process, which had a far lower rate of overturning scores at the 2004 Olympics, at least)," Nick Zaccardi wrote in a Sports Illustrated column explaining the system, using the acronym for the International Gymnastics Federation. "The FIG did away with the perfect 10 and redid its 'code of points' system with the more complicated two-pronged approach. The benefits of the change included eliminating potential bias in judging, the FIG said in 2005. Video review was also introduced."
Team USA's use of the inquiry in Raisman's case was the third in gymnastics during this Olympics alone.
Japan made a similar request over Kohei Uchimura's score on the pommel horse during the men's team finals.
Uchimura, one of the best men's gymnasts and a hero in his home country, was seen as a lock to propel Japan to a medal. But after his score was shown on the screen, it seemed Japan would be left off the podium. The scores placed China with the gold, Great Britain with the silver and Ukraine with the bronze. Japan, like Raisman, sat in fourth.
As commentators on NBC wondered whether "the greatest gymnast of our time dropped the ball," the camera quickly panned to the judges' table, where a Japanese coach was seen with money in his hand, filling out an inquiry form. FIG requires a payment of $300 to file an appeal. If the score is overturned, the money is returned.
Japan claimed that Uchimura had also been overlooked in the scoring: specifically, that he did connect a handstand before his dismount.
Japan challenged the score given to gymnast Kohei Uchimura on the pommel horse during the men's team final.
An announcement came in Japan's favor. It was one that greatly altered the standings. Ukraine was left without a medal, and the host nation was now taking home the bronze, something the home crowd was clearly displeased about.
During the men’s all-around competition, Germany's Fabian Hambuchen's pommel horse score was also protested, but the committee rejected the appeal.
The nature of scoring in gymnastics, similar to figure skating, has been debated as largely subjective despite attempts to correct concerns through recent FIG changes.
That's something Romania's Ponor, who lost out on a medal after Raisman's challenge, and her coach now know all too well. Ponor's face went from excitement to disappointment in the course of a few minutes. Coach Yuliy Kuksenkov who said after the ruling that "life is life," perhaps best capturing many people's thoughts regarding the routine disagreements about scoring.
"In athletics, 100 meters is just 100 meters," Sports Illustrated quoted him as saying. "Sometimes in gymnastics, it's 95 meters or 105 meters."
It's not all about gymnastics, though.
A scoring controversy in fencing last week left South Korea's Shin A-Lam in tears - and left her refusing to leave the piste. She appealed to judges over a delayed and stuck clock that had resulted in extra points being awarded to Britta Heidemann of Germany. Had she left the piste during the appeal, it would have signaled she agreed with the judges.
YouTube: A Lego re-enactment with the play-by-play, created by The Guardian
The South Korean was photographed sitting in the same spot for more than 70 minutes as she awaited the appeal and then refused to leave after it was handed down. She was finally escorted off the stage, sobbing.
South Korea's Shin A-Lam was finally escorted off in tears.
"I did everything I could," Shin told Reuters after the match. "They said 'your fencer has to continue the match,' so I had to accept the decision."
Accepting the decision may be part of it, but so is being prepared and willing to fight for the scores you believe are deserved.
U.S. gymnast Jordyn Wieber's coach told Sports Illustrated that he kept a filled-out inquiry form with him, just in case.
But as Raisman, Brestyan, Ponor, Uchimura, Shin and others know: It's an imperfect two-sided coin. You have to know when to make the call and be able to do it quickly in gymnastics, and sometimes you just fall on the wrong side of the ruling.
"I agree with the system," Brestyan said, according to Sports Illustrated. "The system sometimes helps. Sometimes not."
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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To Ann2323:
Before you post something questioning someone's knowledge of Football maybe you should look in the mirror:
Law 12 of FIFA rules states that a free-kick or penalty will be awarded if a player "handles the ball deliberately".
It further elaborates that a handball coming from a close play is considered more accidental than a strike by a ball coming from afar, because the player would have time to move out of the way.
the ball was coming towards her. instead of taking one for the team, the defender twisted her body around causing her arm to move up into an un-natural position upon which the ball (that was on path towards the goal) struck her arm. Case closed. And yes, i am very familiar with FIFA rules but you still choose to see it in a way to quench your anti-american thirst.
Football? You mean soccer. This is an American website. We have a football all ready.
I was about to jump in with another comment about the handball, but bad ref's are part of soccer. This article is about subjectively scored sports like gymnastics and diving. As bad as it is now, it's still much better than in the cold war when eastern block judges routinely underscored US athletes.
The US should be ashamed of themselves for intimidating the "judges" into buckling under their pressure. They knew they were taking it from a girl who wouldn't fight back.
The judges are croupt, just like the entire olympic commission. The olympics are a joke, a ghost of there former glory. It is all about money now, just like every other business
If the judges would have scored it correctly then an appeal would not have been necessary, your argument is null and void. USA all day.
yeah, that's what they did...sigh.
How was that intimidation??? They filed their appeal as how it is supposed to be filed. They used the due process that is given to any athlete in the olympic games.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Olympics is a joke and completely bought out by the US. The Yanks will go to any extent so that their athlete wins a medal. If they don't they start challenging the judges or the opposition as usual. If they do a self reality check, most of their athletes have been taking performance enhancing drugs since decades. Such are the real gold medal winners from USA...lol
i feel bad for Shin. Taking your victory like that must be tough.
@steve gate.... your spelling is embarassing. Their = There.
I know I am American, but it is ridiculous how the article never mentions when unfairly America wins and is on the other side of the coin.
The Canada vs USA soccer game was the perfect example. Plain and simple, Canada was robbed of the win they deserved by a terrible and biased Norwegian ref. She gave a goal kick simply because USA was running out of time and Canada was going to win the match so she did that. Everyone who knows the rule, can tell it was a completely unfair judgement.
Canada should have won the soccer game 3-2. It would have never gone to overtime and it would have never given US all the time in the world to equal and then do the final goal in the last 1 minute.
Plain and simple. That is the reality of the situation. The win was awarded by ref to US. The better team did not win. Canada should have won.
you fail to mention a very important fact. Canada lost the game because of Rapione's corner kick goal. Never, i mean never, should a corner kick trickle into the near post without one person touching it.
Had the same handball call been made in the 15th minute and Canada came back and tied it up it wouldn't be as big a controversy... The point I am making is Canada had 120 minutes to have scored their 4th goal, and you are also assuming that the US wouldn't have scored in the final 15 minutes as well which is a big assumption to make. The delay of game was a bad call, the hand ball less so. The arm was in an unnatural position and the ball might have slipped through to an advancing attacker without it. Will players now be allowed to step in front of the ball and then put their hand up to protect their face at all times?
1) If a player believes there was an error made in scoring they should file a protest.
2) The American's complaining of the anti-American comments, stop whining and grow up.
3) Those of you who say the Americans always cry foul and cannot accept defeat, stop whining and grow up.
4) When you're watching the Olympics and think there was a bad call don't pick on the player's involved or make it an issue of the countries involved. Voice your opinion of the "bad" call based on why the judges call was incorrect. Reading most of these posted comments reminds me of what it was like playing games when I was five years old.
What are you talking about? If you handle the ball inside the penalty box it's penalty, on top of that what about the Canadian player who stumped on the Wombach's head and committed about seven fouls and only received a yellow card. Please go and learn something about soccer before making such dumb comments.
No, Canada was caught stalling for time, on numerous occasions. The keeper was warned and she kept doing it. Team USA started counting out loud which prompted the ref to make the call.
The Olympics are about representing a nation. Anything involving judging should not be in the Olympics. Leave those to the World Championships.
I guess that you'll have to remove all sports with a ref because they make judgement calls. Whoops! There goes them all! This has impacted bicycling, track and field events, and the rest.
For some-time now, we have had the technological capabilities to digitally 'judge' just-about anything, with tolerances to the enth-place. Eliminate the judges and referees, take-away the human-factor in scoring and judging. Use technology, it won't ever be wrong, and cannot be argued with. We use this for criminal forensics, and is now indisputable in court. Someone want to actually stand-up and say this won't work in sports ?! ANY opposing viewpoint would be due-only-to tradition. I'm sure the lousy judges and refs could find other work.., possibly in the housekeeping or foodservice industries.
Wrong. An event with a referee involves some judgment, but it's far less than an event where winning is entirely based on judges.
The olympics are SUPPOSED to be about purity of sport, NOT representing one's nation.
In its present form, it's a dog and pony show for people who do no real work.
many who participate and train hard for many years would call it work.
And you, I suppose, get to judge what "real work" is? Like... commenting on a CNN post?
No, the modern Olympics is supposed to be a way to keep nations from channeling their nationalist feelings into a war like Adolph did back in the 1930's. So it's extremely appropriate to have ridiculous levels of nationalism, and the athletes ARE there to represent their home nations – even in Ancient times, the Greek participants represented their particular city-states.
The only way you'll ever have something focused on the "purity" of the sport being judged is if super-fast cameras can capture the athlete well enough for a computer algorithm to calculate how close to form the athlete is.
The original concept was to award the individual, not teams or nations. Judging was minimal as events were contested to a finish. Many modern events were once considered entertainment.
I agree.
Insane nationalism in sports is why I NEVER watch the Olympics.
But yet you read articles on the Olympics AND comment on them!
I applaud your statement...I agree with you – nationalism? No thanks..."Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." – Albert Einstein
@major1988
What do you suggest: medals for all participants, "we're all winners!" lol
Agreed...any subjective judging is opinion, not judging. If you can't keep a score or time it, drop anything requiring idiosyncratic judging. How many times past did we see Communist judges giving high scores to communist countries? These so called sports, where there are no finite scores need to be eliminated. Watching two athletes roll/dance around the gym mats, only to have a .001 score separate them, is just plain dumb and unfair.
So, I guess we'd have to get rid of baseball (umpires make judgement calls every pitch), basketball (was that a charge, or blocking?), football (did he have control before he went out of bounds, did he move before the ball, etc.), and EVERY sport that is played. Any sport that has rules has to be monitored by someone or something and that introduces the possibility of human error.
its the olympics who cares?
Using an Austrian judge for a German game? Nice.
actually if you look at what the original events were in the Olympics you might be surprised most were about judging, most had nothing to do with sport either and more to do with the arts.
Jules,
Really the first Olympics were about arts and crafts. You had better go check you history books. There were set up in Grease between city states to see who had the better military units. The first Olympic sports (Wrestling, Javelin (or Spear Chucking), Shot-put, Chariot Racing, Running Distance (Delivering Messages), Horse Skills (Calvary) and so forth and so on. I do not think Sparta asked Athens hey lets see who has the better mosaic artist or the better column carver.
.......just like everything else in the word..........
Fact is Raisman might have deserved that Bronze on the balance beam, but she did not deserve the gold for her floor routine. The Romanian Ponar's floor routine was much better – you could hear the crowd's dispointment – and there were more americans than romanians in the crowd.
The Korean might have been right to protest, but she looks like another oriental spoiled brat whining, what a show!
susan: racist much?
susan, your ignorance is astounding.
Susan, people are Asian, rugs are oriental. If you're going to excercise bigotry, please at least be correct in how you do it.
Is there any sport that doesn't require some sort of judgment? Even in swimming and track & field, close finishes come down to human judgment
Phelps' victory in the 2008 100 meter butterfly was .01 seconds by timer, not judgement. The Serb coach protested, saying Cavic didn't press the sensor hard enough to trigger it, but the decision was upheld by objective video evidence, not judgement.
Ultimately, in even in events now judged like gymnastics, they'll have to put tiny GPS emitters at crucial points on the contestants bodies and allow computers to track movements and issue points.
Huh, no they don't. Swimming uses high tech touch pads. Track uses photos.
Swimming has a judge standing at both ends of each lane to catch other infractions.
Not is swimming
i'm pretty sure they have some kind of sensors in track and swimming.
Video replay
Maybe you mean diving instead of swimming? Swimming events are timed which the swimmer must touch the wall to finish and diving is judged. Sometimes swimming events( High School) do require people with stop watches, yet I hope they don't do that in the olympics?
In swimming, there is no dispute with very accurate time measurement technology.
Gymnastics – can you even follow what they are doing? (so fast!)
Fencing – British volunteers hand-start the clock. (and ends automatically with scoring)
No wonder there are disputes.
Actually, no. They come down to times. The first person to finish, wins. If there are any disputes (like false starts), there is always the replay to show who was right. Judgement does not factor into it.
Chess hardly requires judgement of any arbiter.
No, it doesn't in swimming. As long as the computer works, hands touching the wall trigger the clock to stop through sensors on the walls. And please, don't try to compare the "human judgement" of looking at a photo finish on the 100 meter race to the "human judgement" on "yeah, I think that gymnast's 2 1/2 back flip was better than the one before."
Proven by technology... not just human judgement,
Not in swimming. The wall of the pool has a computer touch pad. Times are recorded in 100ths of seconds.
Actually Lonnie, in swimming, when you touch the end of the pool there is a pad that recognizes you have touched it. That actually determines who the winner is, not a human.
No they don't. Swimming events have electronic sensor pads at the finish. Running events have photographs. High jump has a bar. I can't think of a single track and field event that relies on human judgement for the result.
Gymnastics, diving and the like take a higher degree of subjective judgement. The Olympics should be about sports with quantifiable results. Citius, Altius, Fortius.
That is exactly wrong. It comes down to technology...timers.
The Referees are not up to par either. Just ask the Canadian women's soccer team.
Where does that $300 inquiry fee go if it isnt returned?
To pay the judges' bar tab.
Then boxing cant be in the olympics...
I am disgusted with ALL the judging . Too many questionables calls another reason to TERMINATE the Olympics
I feel bad for Catalina Ponor of Romania.