King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Olympics: Paul Hamm makes history and gets Roy Jones Jr.'s revenge. Plus: LeBron James' learning curve. And: Beach volleyballers and shot-putters.

Aug 19, 2004 | That was a great finish in the men's gymnastics all-around final Wednesday, a clutch performance by Paul Hamm of the U.S. to come from way behind, recovering from a crash on the vault to nail routines on the parallel bars and high bar to win the gold. He's the first American man to win all-around gold, and that moment when his coaches told him he'd won and he said, "What? No!" is an instant classic.

But a few seconds later, the cameras focused on Kim Dae Eun of South Korea, who had been in the lead. He buried his face in a towel, and I thought of Roy Jones Jr. in 1988, who did the same thing when he got robbed in the gold-medal boxing match.

In one of the most memorable instances of crooked judging in Olympic history, Jones beat a Korean opponent pillar to post in Seoul only to lose the decision. Jones climbing out of the ring with a towel pressed to his face is the most memorable image in Olympic boxing since George Foreman waved those little American flags in 1968. Korean judges later admitted taking bribes, and the incident led to amateur boxing adopting a scoring system that's good at preventing judicial impropriety and lousy at scoring fights.

This is being largely ignored by an American media lavishing well-deserved praise on Hamm for his gritty, inspired and inspiring comeback, but his opponents thought the judging smelled a little funny.

"It is quite possible the judges scored, consciously or not, in favor of Hamm," said Korea Gymnastic Association official Kim Sung-ho in the Korea Times. "They might have scored him in a sympathetic way after a star like Hamm tumbled in the vault event, and it cannot be overlooked that the United States is powerful" in the International Gymnastic Federation.

"I'm rather disappointed and angry, in a way," said Kim, who settled for the silver. Ioan Suciu of Romania, who finished fourth, also said Hamm got some help from the judges. "I think the USA got something more than it deserved."

Some of this might be sour grapes. Maybe all of it is. I don't know enough about gymnastics scoring to say how strange the scoring was. But if the nationalities were reversed, the story in this country wouldn't be the gold medalist's spectacular late routines or even the silver medalist's leaving the door open for him, but the wacky judging.

Next Page: "No chance," everyone said. What didn't they know? Plus: LeBron learns. And: beach volleyball and shot putting

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