They’re All Setting the Bar Low in Uneven Sportsmanship Event

It was the perfect metaphor for a perfectly awful situation:

Paul Hamm, surrounded by boos he had not caused, standing in a limbo where he did not belong.

An Olympic gold medal winner being treated as if he did not exist.

It happened Monday night when Hamm followed Russian star Alexei Nemov in the individual high bar finals.

Thousands of fans, angered at the score given Nemov, and perhaps fueled by the controversy over Hamm’s all-around gold medal from last week, booed for 8 1/2 minutes. The outburst halted the action and made Hamm wait, as if the star were nothing more than a dim blinking light.

No one had ever seen anything like it.

But then, should anyone be surprised?

Once your own Olympic committee sticks a knife in the back of your singlet and plops you on the altar of world perception, why should anybody take you seriously?

“This should have been the best week of Paul’s life, and he has to deal with all this stuff?” said Bob Colarossi, U.S. Gymnastics president. “It’s inaccurate, and it’s unfair.”

And it has to stop, now, this talk of Hamm sharing Wednesday’s all-around gold medal with South Korea’s Yang Tae Young.

Sportsmanship? This is more like politically- correctsmanship.

Proper etiquette? This is more like blatant pandering, by U.S. officials and journalists so desperate for the rest of the world to like them.

During these troubled world times, it is noble for Americans here to strive for a make-nice Olympics.

But not at the expense of the sorts of rules that even those in ancient Olympia -- under penalty of flogging -- strove to uphold.

And certainly not at the expense of a 21-year-old kid who followed those rules and now might have to suffer because some others didn’t.

“I’m very upset; this matter should never have come up,” Hamm said Monday night. “They are putting this decision entirely on me and it has nothing to do with me.”

Even for those who wouldn’t know Hamm from green eggs, the controversy is simple.

After Hamm won Wednesday’s championship by the closest margin in history, the International Gymnastics Federation acknowledged that Yang was given the wrong start value for his parallel bars routine, a 9.9 instead of a 10.

Had he been scored correctly -- and all other things being equal -- Yang would have won the gold medal, dropping Hamm into a silver.

If this were the end of the story, South Korea might have reason for outrage.

But there’s one more thing.

The gymnastics federation has a rule that covers this exact issue.

The rule is that a scoring error must be protested immediately after the incident, much as the NFL orders coaches to demand instant replay immediately after the play.

The Korean officials didn’t protest until after the event.

Case closed.

The person they should be chasing is not Paul Hamm, but whoever among them is in charge of checking the giant scoreboard that displays the start values.

“When we have an athlete on the floor, there are three things we look at every time,” Colarossi said. “We look at the start value, we look at his score, and we look at the leaderboard.”

The Koreans now are claiming they immediately told one of the judges about the mistake -- and were told to wait. A witness, however, says he never saw them approach the table.

Even if this did happen, why wouldn’t they then have taken the protest to someone else, running from judge to judge, waving their arms and bellowing until somebody listened? Just as they’re doing now?

A more likely scenario is, the Koreans blew it and are afraid to admit it because somebody might lose his job, and isn’t

this worse than the mistake itself?

Some, including U.S. officials, have suggested that because the score was wrong, a second gold medal should be given Yang, regardless of the rules.

One more problem. The event in question was not the final event. There was one more discipline remaining.

So if the scores change, shouldn’t Hamm be given a chance to rework his last routine with the knowledge that he is further behind? You see where we’re going here?

“You have a bad call in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, you find out about it later, you don’t change the score,” Colarossi said.

One of the enduring truths of sport is, the players aren’t the only humans. Mistakes happen. A college football team from Colorado gets five downs and wins a share of the national championship. A baseball team from St. Louis suffers a blown call at first base and loses a World Series.

The bad call here is by the USOC, which announced it would consider supporting a second gold medal for Yang.

Give that decision a 0.0 start value. The politics here are dirtier than any suspended U.S. track star.

Amid international distaste for America because of our involvement in Iraq, it’s one thing for USOC officials to ask athletes here to downplay their patriotism.

But this is reneging on it.

To support sharing the gold medal would be to slap the blue berets off all those U.S. athletes who have spent their lives following not only their dreams, but the rules of their sports and the values that support them.

How can the USOC ask anyone to work quietly for victory if another nation can whine loud enough to share it?

There is also some talk from journalists that perhaps Hamm should actually offer to give up the medal and become a bigger hero. Those same journalists would never give up a writing award if a superior competitor turned in a late entry, yet they are asking Hamm to give up his life’s achievement for essentially the same reason?

“I truly believe in my heart that I am the Olympic all-around champion,” Hamm said. “I did my job with class and integrity.”

So far, he’s the only one.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.