Athens gymnastic debacle

If Utah Jazz fans had learned this trick sooner, an NBA championship banner would hang from the rafters of the Delta Center.

It goes like this: If you don't like the call of the officials, incite the crowd to throw a loud, long-lasting tantrum. Keep it up long enough and the officials start to second-guess themselves. Eventually, the score is changed.

To the casual observer, that's what happened Tuesday night at the Olympic Indoor Hall in Athens when gymnastics fans loudly and endlessly booed the scores awarded to Russian gymnast Alexei Nemov on the high bar. The judges raised Nemov's score to 9.762, but International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) officials say the score was amended because the Malaysian and Canadian judges weren't within range of the other four judges. Even after the score was changed, Nemov was out of medal contention.

American Paul Hamm had to perform his high bar routine while the audience was still hissing. The crowd — still angry about an earlier judging controversy in the all-around competition in which Hamm won the gold medal — wasn't happy about Hamm's score of 9.812, which won him silver.

Instead of owning the judging mistakes in the all-around, some members of FIG wanted Hamm to smooth over the problem-riddled gymnastics competition by giving his gold medal to Korean Yang Tae Young. The judges assigned the wrong start value to Yang's parallel bar routine in the all-around competition and his coaches failed to protest in time. Yang was awarded the bronze.

Add to that the complaints lodged by Russian Olympic officials with the IOC and FIG that judging cost Svetlana Khorkina the all-around gold in the women's finals. She won the silver behind American Carly Patterson.

Of course, the International Gymnastics Federation is no stranger to controversy. Remember the Sydney Games, when the vault was set too low in the women's all-around competition? When the error was discovered and rectified, competitors were allowed to re-do their vaults, which was tantamount to using a Band-Aid to stem a massive hemorrhage.

The fact that such an exacting sport is subject to such inexact errors is somewhat incomprehensible. How is it that start values of routines aren't correctly loaded onto the judges' computers before the start of each competition? How is it at a high-stakes competition that coaches don't know the protest procedures by heart? How can equipment be set wrong in a world-class competition?

The International Gymnastics Federation has since said it would not award a second gold medal, which is only right.

Still, Hamm shouldn't own the shortcomings of his sport and he shouldn't be asked by any Olympic official to relinquish his gold medal. Instead, the IOC must insist that FIG clean up its act or risk serious sanctions, which could include pulling the plug on gymnastics in the 2008 Games in Beijing.