International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) Women’s Technical Committee President Nellie Kim refused to be drawn on suggestions that future World Championships should have a tie-breaking rule after four gymnasts were awarded gold in the women’s uneven bars event here yesterday.
Kim, a five-times Olympic gold medallist, claimed it was “up to the FIG Executive Committee” to decide following an historic result, where Russians Daria Spiridonova and Viktoria Komova, Madison Kocian of the United States and China’s Fan Yilin all finished on a score of 15.366 points.
With no tie-breaking rule in place, all four athletes won gold for the first time in the history of the World Championships and no silver or bronze medals were handed out.
The unprecedented occurrence has led to calls for the rules to be changed in order to avoid a repeat, with even Kocian admitting after the competition that she “wasn’t sure if they were going to do a tie-breaker”.
“Those are the rules at World Championships,” Kim said.
“When the execution scores were added the result was a coincidence.
“I don’t think that even if the judges wanted to do this on purpose they could have calculated it.
“It was just one of those things that happened.
“If we had followed the Olympic rules, we would have had fewer gold medals.”
FIG President Bruno Grandi, due to step down from the role next year after 20 years in charge of world gymnastics’ governing body, also claimed he was “satisfied” with the judging at the event here in Glasgow, claiming it had been “better” than previous World Championships.
Liam Morgan, this article was republished with permission from the original publisher Inside the Games www.insidethegames.biz