Olympic Legal Invasion |
August 31, 2004 |
I am likely to make myself unpopular with a number of people with my opinion on the subject of the legal challenge to Bettina Hoy's performance in the olympic equestrian 3-day event. For those that are not in the know, Bettina Hoy of Germany passed the starting line twice, and this is not allowed. The Jury of Appeal overturned the ground judge decision to give her a 14 point penalty on the grounds that the starting bell had gone, but a legal challenge by the other 3 teams taken to the Court of Arbitration for Sport managed to overturn the Jury of Appeal, and reallocated the gold, silver and bronze medals, kicking Germany out of the running.
Why am I annoyed? Because this isn't about who came first, or who the best rider is, or who did best on the day, but who has the most astute legal team. It comes as little shock that the USA legal team are the geniuses behind this particular legal challenge - if there's a legal way to come first that doesn't involve being faster on the day, they were bound to find it.
Not that I approve of flaunting the rules in the first place, but the wait for the details before you come to a personal judgement on this one.
So the sequence of events goes something like this - The German rider crosses the starting line twice, which usually incurs a penalty, but the starting bell had not rung, so they argued that this penalty should not be counted. Aside from that, their rider was the fastest on the day, and nobody seems to be willing to tackle the subject of whether the alleged infraction gave their rider any advantage at all - my opinion is that not advantage was gained by crossing the start line twice, especially since the bell had yet to ring.
Either way, immediately the ground judges impose a penalty on Bettina Hoy, and after the event, the Germans rapidly challenged that in front of a panel.
The US team did what one might expect, they called their lawyers. The lawyers quickly proved that, according to the detailed rules of the sport, the panel in question did not have the power to overturn the ground judges. Note here that they did NOT prove anything about the decision itself, only that the panel in question should not have had the power to adjudicate in this case. The Court of Arbitration for Sport applied the letter of the law, and now an American has Gold, and as the Wall street journal pointed out, their precious sponsorship is probably now safeguarded.
One of the most basic differences I noticed between legal argument in the US and the same in the rest of the world is that the letter of the law is the only law in the US, whereas the spirit of the law is more highly respected elsewhere. I personally find it tragic that the Olympics has been tainted by an attitude that a legal condition is more important than whether or not a person was better on the day. The question should have been, "did this confer any advantage", and if not, and indeed the bell had not rung, and a misunderstanding was at the root of it all, then this should have been thrown into the trash where it belonged, along with multi-million medial liability insurance and the other nauseating products of the out-of-control American legal system that serve to pad the pockets of legal intermediaries while poisoning the lives of everyone else and adding nothing to moral justice and creating a huge net drain on society.
This is the Olympics, and if the commercial stakes are high enough to warrant the use of lawyers and the reduction of sporting performance to legal decisions, then I consider them to have been polluted by domestic US commercial interests, which is tragic and sad. It took only a phone call to tempt the English and French into joining in the attack, and every article I read gloats about how wonderful it is to have won a medal in this event. Get over it - you didn't win it, you were not the best on the day, and in your heart you know it, and if you put detailed rules and legal shenanigans above personal performance, then you shouldn't be in the sport in the first place.
How come this annoys me so much? Because every article I read is so self-serving and content with winning a legal victory - where is the spirit of the sport? This would dovetail nicely with a discussion of how many athletes took drugs - detectable and otherwise - to compete, but I'm depressed enough as things stand.
