Jordan Chiles Still Has Bronze Medal After Olympics Controversy
Jordan Chiles is sharing a rare update on her Paris Olympics controversy four months after her third-place win was questioned, revealing that she still has her bronze medal.
“I have the medal. The medal is mine,” the Team USA gymnast, 23, said on Today on Monday, November 11, in her first TV interview since the controversy unfolded.
During the individual floor routine competition at the 2024 Olympics on August 5, Jordan initially placed fifth, with Romanian gymnast Ana Bărbosu awarded the third-place bronze medal. However, Jordan’s coaches quickly filed an inquiry claiming that her difficulty score was too low. The judges made an adjustment to the scores, which ended up putting Jordan in third place above both Ana, 18, and original fourth-place winner Sabrina Maneca-Voinea.
The International Olympics Committee later claimed that Jordan’s coaches submitted the inquiry four seconds too late, despite a camera crew capturing footage that proved otherwise.
The IOC announced on August 11 that the bronze medal would be given to Ana. “We are in touch with the NOC of Romania to discuss the reallocation ceremony and with USOPC regarding the return of the bronze medal,” the organization said in a statement.
Jordan later filed an appeal with the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland in “continuation of Chiles’s pursuit of justice for the bronze medal,” the Oregon native’s attorney shared in a statement on September 16. The filing was supported by the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), according to her attorney Maurice Suh.
“First, [the Court of Arbitration for Sport] violated Chiles’s fundamental ‘right to be heard’ by refusing to consider the video evidence that showed her inquiry was submitted on time — in direct contradiction to the findings in CAS’s decision,” the statement read. “Second, the entire CAS proceeding was unfair because Chiles was not properly informed that Hamid G. Gharavi, the President of the CAS panel that revoked Chiles’s bronze medal and awarded it instead to a Romanian gymnast, had a serious conflict of interest.”
Jordan said on Monday that she waited to personally speak on the matter in an interview because she was nervous and was still processing everything.
“Honestly, it’s been really, really hard just to comprehend everything that’s been happening,” she explained. “Finally, now I feel comfortable, in a way, to talk about what has been happening. I feel like I recently have been trying to tell myself I’ve been OK, the past four, five months, and it’s honestly been a very, very difficult time.”
Jordan continued, “It’s hard to tell yourself that everything’s going to be fine when you know literally we didn’t do anything wrong. Everything was very right. Everything was in the time that it needed to be, and for them to come back and say it was four seconds late when we’ve had proof. We’ve had everything that really can show that everything was right.”
Becoming emotional, the athlete added, “I’ve been like, ‘OK, I can’t control what’s happening on the outside. I can only control what my truth is.’ I know what the truth is, and I know that we were right in everything that we were doing.”
Jordan also explained why the bronze medal was important to her after winning gold with Team USA in the team all-around final.
“It was like a cherry on top. My redemption tour going into Paris was yes, coming back with a gold, coming back with the understanding that I was able to go out there and be the best version of myself. And with this floor medal it was like, ‘Wow, I never expected myself to even make a floor final,’” she said. “[And] it was an all-Black podium [with Simone Biles winning silver and Rebecca Andrade winning gold], that was history made. That was something I was very proud to be a part of.”