Olympic bronze medal controversy took away ‘the person I am’

USA gymnast Jordan Chiles spoke this week about losing her Olympic bronze medal, saying that the controversy and the resulting racist backlash brought up traumatic memories she has worked to overcome.

“To me, everything that has gone on, it’s not about the medal,” she said Wednesday at the Forbes Power Women Summit. “It’s about, you know, my skin color. It’s about the fact there were things that have led up to this position of being an athlete, and I felt like everything has been stripped. I felt like [I did] when I was back in 2018, where I did lose the love of the sport, I lost it again.”

The 23-year-old gymnast said the “biggest thing” she lost was “the recognition of who I was.”

“Not just my sport, but my — the person I am,” she said.

In August, Chiles was stripped of the bronze medal in the Olympic floor exercise after a sporting arbitration body ruled that an appeal of her score in the category had been incorrectly granted. Although her score initially put her in fifth place behind two Romanian gymnasts, her coaches filed an inquiry, and the judges awarded her an additional 0.1 points, which moved her into third. The Romanian Gymnastics Federation appealed the score adjustment after the medal ceremony, and the arbitration court ruled that Chiles’ challenge came four seconds too late, though Team USA disputed that it was outside the time limit.

The court ruling sparked outrage in the U.S., but the controversy around the score change also stoked a frenzy of racist attacks online against Chiles. USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee denounced the “utterly baseless and extremely hurtful attacks on social media” against her.

Chiles, who was part of the team that won gold in the women’s gymnastics team final at Paris, has spoken out publicly about how racism and the intense pressure of the sport have affected her. She said on Wednesday that she trained in 2018 under a coach who was abusive toward her, and that the medal controversy brought up similar emotions.

Chiles said that when her medal was first taken away, she struggled to feel the support from the public. “But,” she added, “I do appreciate it so much, and I don’t think I could be where I am right now … if it wasn’t for everyone being right by my side and really recognizing what the right thing is.”