US Olympics star Jordan Chiles made a shocking racism claim as she reflected on her Paris 2024 bronze medal being rescinded, as she insisted that people ‘didn’t want to see three beautiful Black women standing on that podium’.
The Team USA gymnastics star was controversially stripped of her individual bronze in the floor exercise at last summer’s Games following a dispute involving Romania’s Ana Barbosu.
After initially coming in fifth place, a United States appeal raised Chiles’ marks by one-tenth to move her up to third behind Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade and teammate Simone Biles.
Yet that changed when the Romanian athletic commission later filed an appeal of their own to the International Olympic Committee over the scores that dropped Barbosu from the medal stand.
Days after the event, the IOC concluded that the original United States challenge of the scores was filed four seconds too late and was therefore invalid, meaning Chiles was ordered to return the medal after it was reallocated to the Romanian athlete.
Now, over a year on from the incident last August, Chiles was recently asked if she felt she had ‘experienced racism’ in relation to the decision to strip her of the medal -before discussing, what she perceived to be, opposition to an ‘all-Black podium’.
Jordan Chiles made a stunning claim in regard to the decision to rescind her Paris 2024 medal
Chiles, pictured alongside Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade (center) and Simone Biles (left), said people ‘didn’t want to see three beautiful Black women standing on that podium’
Romania’s Ana Barbosu reclaimed the medal on an appeal in the days after the event
During an appearance on the ‘Baby, this is Keke Palmer’ podcast, Chiles said: ‘At first, I didn’t think of it in that way until I started almost literally getting racist comments and saying this and saying that and basically telling like people were telling me to kill myself and it got to a really, really tough point.
‘I had to get off of social media for a while. Because it was, you know, it was really hard to even see that, as an athlete, like, let alone an athlete, I’m up, there, yes, it’s an ‘all-Black’ podium, which is very rare, it’s obviously something that people don’t like.
‘As being a woman of color, I started seeing it more. They didn’t want to see that, they didn’t want to see three beautiful Black women standing on that podium. They didn’t want to see the fact that we were just dominating. And I really took that to heart.’
As Barbosu celebrated winning bronze in the women’s floor final at the Games, Chiles and her United States team – led by her coach Cecile Landi – appealed her score from her routine, believing her split leap was not graded properly.
The judges agreed, bumping Chiles up to third and leaving Barbosu in tears and out of the medal positions. Instead, it was Chiles on the podium with Andrade and Biles.
Days later, the Romanian Gymnastics Federation appealed, saying Chiles’ team didn’t contest the score in the allotted one-minute deadline.
The Court of Arbitration of Sport upheld the appeal and Barbosu was awarded a bronze medal in Bucharest. In the meantime, the Romanian prime minister threatened to boycott the closing ceremony.
The following day, Chiles was ordered to return her bronze medal by the International Olympic Committee.
Chiles revealed that she had to ‘get off social media’ in wake of the controversy last summer
Back in March, Chiles claimed that Barbosu’s coach at the Paris Olympics is to blame for the scenes of devastation that she experienced.
In her book ‘I’m That Girl’, she wrote: ‘I was crushed and angry. None of this would have happened if Ana’s coach, who knew that Cecile had submitted an inquiry right after my floor routine, had waited for the inquiry results to come in before allowing Ana to take the podium, holding her flag.
‘That was highly unusual and premature. Our coaches would not have allowed us to do that. Everyone knows you don’t celebrate until after everything is final – and an inquiry for my score had been announced.’
She continued: ‘The fact that the validity of my medal was being questioned after the fact – days after the medal ceremony had taken place – was surprising and outrageous to me.
‘Once the medal ceremony has happened, that is the final result unless a drug or rules violation is discovered. That had been the case at every single Olympics in history.’
Ironically, Barbosu’s coach that day was Patrick Kiens – who has since been hired by the World Champions Centre in Texas, where Chiles and Simone Biles practice.
