Appeal for Hamm's Olympic gold to be heard by court

LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- One way or another, Paul Hamm's gold medal odyssey is about to end.

Whether he gets to keep the medal and the title he won a month ago in the Olympic men's gymnastics all-around will be up to the sporting world's highest authority.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport will hear the appeal Monday from a South Korean gymnast who believes he was unfairly deprived of the gold because of a scoring error.

Yang Tae-young wants CAS to order international gymnastics officials to reorder the rankings and give him the gold medal and Hamm the silver. But Hamm and the U.S. Olympic Committee promise to fight Yang's appeal as vigorously as the South Korean has battled in his quest for the gold.

"I feel like I had to win my medal in three ways, really," said Hamm, the first American man to win the all-around title. "Obviously, in competition. Then with the media. Then in court. It really feels like I've been battling this whole time."

A panel of three arbitrators will hear the appeal at CAS headquarters in Lausanne in a closed hearing. It's not known how soon they will render a decision.

Yang mistakenly was docked 0.1 points for the level of difficulty in his parallel bars routine. If Yang had received the proper score, he would have finished 0.051 points ahead of Hamm, although that assumes everything in the final rotation would have played out the same way.

Even though the International Gymnastics Federation, known as FIG, acknowledged the error and suspended the judges, it said repeatedly it wouldn't change the results because the South Koreans didn't file a protest in time.

And even if the protest had been filed in time, Hamm's supporters say an inadvertent error by judges shouldn't have caused such a maelstrom.

"I've been surprised by the whole thing," USA Gymnastics president Bob Colarossi said. "I've been saying from the very beginning that the competition was over the night the results were published. It's a bad precedent to look at field-of-play calls in court. There's a human element in sport. There are always going to be some things that happen that on review might have gone differently."

CAS traditionally does not involve itself in "field-of-play decisions," such as the scoring error that caused all these problems, but Yang had nowhere else to go. The USOC rebuffed the South Korean Olympic Committee's plea for Hamm's medal.

FIG repeatedly has said it cannot change the results of the competition, and International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge refused to get involved in the case.

The USOC is spending about $300,000 to defend Hamm's case. Hamm planned to be in Switzerland along with his attorneys, USOC legal counsel Jeff Benz and Colarossi.

"We're extremely proud of what Paul accomplished," USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said. "We plan to vigorously defend Paul's case."