Gold Medal Level Racism
France tops the podium for once
Racism is a sickness, and there is a global pandemic.
Early on in the olympics, we saw the symptoms. Coco Gauff was clearly in the right about a botched call from the line judge that ended her time in the Olympics in Paris. The line judge incorrectly ruled for her opponent from Croatia, she (Gauff) later talked about how she ALWAYS has an issue with them there and was not surprised.
Not much later, over on the basketball court— the team from South Sudan was subject to—questionable— calls as the team from Serbia mounted an impressive comeback. Now, South Sudan was one of the feel good stories of Olympic basketball, a team comprising players who don’t even have an indoor gym to play organized games and train. As the game went on, it seemed the players from South Sudan were prone to fouling while Serbia played as innocent angels. The team president would later say the referees preconceived bias of aggression in their players caused the unequal officiating in the game.
And as the 3am infomercials so often state— BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.
Out on the track, a miraculous last-minute rule kept Sha’Carri Richardson and Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce from being allowed to warm up before the 100 meters race. (For those who don’t understand, sprinting is VERY technical and your warmup is vital, timed down to the in how you plan for each heat of a race)
Fraser-Pryce withdrew, ending the bid of a sprinting legend who will most likely not be back in 2028. Sha’Carri went on to race but ran one of her worst races of the season and eventually left with a silver medal instead of the gold she could have won.
And then came the nonsense. Retroactively adjusting the score for Jordan Chiles after she was originally awarded the bronze that gave us one of the most iconic pictures ever.
In a first all Black podium, 🐐 Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles showed respect to Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade—who beat out 🐐 for the gold medal. Her story one of perseverance after suffering multiple ACL injuries. Just a beautiful moment all-around.
Enter white woman tears.
To get to the podium, a challenge of Jordan’s scoring had been successful. In short, Jordan did a more difficult routine but wasn’t scored on difficulty. The judges were reminded of their error and corrected their scoring, moving Jordan up from 5th to 3rd and clinching the bronze.
The Romanians were not having it and appealed. I could get into the annoying legalities of it but the bottom line is this—
The appeal of the scoring recognized that the ruling to amend may have been correct BUT the inquiry was a whole FOUR SECONDS too late and was moot, thereby amending the scores to the original and erroneous version.
Disregarding my very lawyerly question of WHEN does the clock even start/stop on recording the inquiry—this is a tragedy.
Note: The clock starts when the music ends and every competitor gets 3 minutes but the last one to go, like Jordan, only gets one minute. My question is how do they get down to the SECOND because it takes time to process information, check time, log it, etc.
Jordan’s sister had this to say:
And Jordan, the person who put her heart and soul into the work to get the bronze and did the extra difficulty to be scored as such, had this heartbreaking response after finding out after a celebratory trip to Disneyland with her medalS and family.
That hurts. For no reason whatsoever, here is a random mention of a piece I did on doing twice as much being a requirement for us.
Look, people try to say WE put race into everything but it is hard when this stuff happens all the time and we see it. We feel it. This was not the only tweet I saw like this, and this was about 15 minutes after the news broke on Jordan:
402,000 views and 18,000 likes because we know the score, we know what it is.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope the IOC does the right thing by Jordan. But what I do know is anti-Black racism is on the rise and it seems infectious. Hopefully we can find a cure soon.
PS— that medal is hers and we know you ain’t that tough France.