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Sports' highest court hears South Korean appeal for gold medal
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-28 10:15

South Korea's Yang Tae-young and Paul Hamm both appeared before the sports world's highest court Monday to argue who should get the American's Olympic gold medal.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport convened to hear the appeal from Yang, who lost the men's all-around gymnastics gold last month in Athens because of a scoring error. No decision was reached Monday.

Yang wants CAS to order international gymnastics officials to change the rankings and give him the gold and Hamm the silver. Hamm and the US Olympic Committee promised to fight Yang's appeal.

``I thought everything went very smoothly,'' Hamm said in a teleconference after the hearing. ``It was a very fair hearing and everyone got the chance to say what they thought.

``If they determine by the rules of gymnastics I should give back my medal, I will.''

Yang and his aides declined to comment after emerging from the closed-door hearing in front of three CAS arbitrators at a hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva.

``We hope the decision will be made in the next two weeks,'' CAS general secretary Matthieu Reeb said.

Yang, who finished with a bronze, was wrongly docked 0.10 points on the start value of his next-to-last routine, the parallel bars. He finished third, 0.049 points behind Hamm, who became the first American man to win gymnastics' biggest prize.

But add the extra 0.100, and Yang would have finished 0.051 points ahead of Hamm. That, however, assumes everything in the final rotation would have played out the same way.

``The issue is whether this (mistake) affected the result,'' Reeb said.

The International Gymnastics Federation acknowledged the error and suspended three judges for the rest of the games. It has said repeatedly it won't change the results because the South Koreans didn't file a protest in time.

USA Gymnastics president Bob Colarossi said the competition should have been considered closed the night the results were published.

``It's a bad precedent to look at field-of-play calls in court,'' he said. ``There's a human element in sport. There are always going to be some things that happen that on review might have gone differently.''

CAS traditionally does not involve itself in ``field-of-play decisions,'' such as the scoring error that caused all these problems, but Yang had nowhere else to go. The US Olympic Committee rebuffed its South Korean counterpart's plea for a duplicate gold medal, and is spending about US$300,000 to defend Hamm.

``We're extremely proud of what Paul accomplished,'' USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said.

IOC president Jacques Rogge also rejected an appeal from the South Koreans.

``Our position is extremely simple. The FIG has certified the result of the gymnastics competition. The IOC has awarded the medals according to the certified results,'' Rogge said last month. ``Paul Hamm was declared the winner and therefore he has received the gold medal, and for us that is final.''

FIG announced Friday it is recommending new rules in response to the gold medal debacle, including the immediate suspension of up to four years for judges who make scoring mistakes. FIG also wants to revise its code of points, an extensive guide to the difficulty value assigned to every move and combination of moves.

``The code of points must be totally revised,'' FIG spokesman Philippe Silacci said.

USA Gymnastics will recommend the use of video replay in the review of start values. The proposals will be considered at by FIG next month in Turkey.



 
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