ATHENS - Paul Hamm's historic victory on Wednesday night in the men's gymnastics all-around competition came under scrutiny yesterday because of an apparent judging error, although it does not appear he will lose his gold medal.
That cannot be said for U.S. swimmer Aaron Peirsol, whose disqualification from the 200-meter backstroke Thursday night was overturned but might still be disputed.
Neither case has reached the level of the scandal at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, when a French judge was determined by the international federation for the sport to have helped fix the pairs skating competition.
But the incidents, along with another this week in the equestrian competition, re-emphasize the difficulty of remaining controversy-free in the Summer Olympics, which feature competition in 28 sports contested over a 17-day period and raise questions about the method of settling disputes.
"You just hope this doesn't become The Protest Olympics and that not everything is appealed to CAS," said Bob Condron, spokesman for the U.S. Olympic Committee.
CAS stands for the Court of Arbitration for Sports, which was commissioned by the International Olympic Committee after the fallout from the figure skating corruption in Salt Lake City to adjudicate when parties in the Olympics felt aggrieved.
The Swiss-based CAS established an office in Athens and, going into the second weekend of competition, has a full docket.
It was unclear whether the South Korean Olympic Committee would take its case to CAS on behalf of Yang Tae Young, who finished third in the gymnastics all-around competition Wednesday night behind Hamm, of Waukesha, Wis., and South Korean teammate Kim Dae Eun.
Yang was given a start value for his parallel bars routine in the finals of 9.9 points. As a result, he could not score above 9.9 regardless how well he performed. In the preliminaries, however, judges had given the same routine a start value of 10.0.
An extra tenth of a point would have given Yang the gold medal, despite the amazing comeback by Hamm from 12th after four rotations to first after the sixth and final one. Hamm won by the smallest margin in the history of Olympic judging in any sport, scoring 57.823 points to 57.811 for Kim and 57.774 for Yang.
