American gymnast Jordan Chiles celebrated the Paris 2024 team gold in a Team USA New Year’s 2025 post on Sunday amid her appeal against the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s (CAS) decision during the last Summer Olympics.
In multiple pictures where the Team USA celebrated their achievement from the Paris 2024 on the New Year’s eve, Chiles was the only gymnast to be featured holding the women’s artistic team all-round event gold medal.
“Leaving 2024 with a lot more hardware 🥇🥈🥉,” the Team USA captioned the picture.
The 23-year-old has launched an appeal against the highest sporting court’s decision to drop her from the third place in the women’s floor exercise final event to fifth.
The controversy was sparked after the US coach requested the judges to review the score after Romania’s Ana Barbosu initially scored higher.
The decision saw Chiles joining teammate, US legend Simone Biles, and Brazil’s Rebecca Andrade at the podium. However, after the end of the Olympic Games in August 2024, the sporting court ruled that Chiles’ appeal was submitted past the one-minute deadline, dropping her to fifth place.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) determined the proceedings and asked Chiles to return the medal.
USA Today reported that Chiles and the US team had no intention of returning the medal with her lawyers arguing that the coach made the appeal in time and there is video evidence to prove it, adding that the officials that favoured Romanian gymnast had ties with their team.
“Chiles asks the Supreme Court to find that the CAS decision was procedurally deficient for two reasons,” Chiles’ lawyers said in a statement, according to Olympics.com.
“First, CAS violated Chiles’ 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’ decision.
“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: Mr. Gharavi has acted as counsel for Romania for almost a decade and was actively representing Romania at the time of the CAS arbitration.”
She has also filed an appeal in the Swiss Federal Supreme Court to overturn the decision.