By Delaney Sniffen
Last month, Sports Law Professor Sarah Hartley and the Virginia Sports and Entertainment Law Society held an event titled “Legal Issues at the Olympics and Paralympics.” Professor Hartley is a Virginia Law alumna and teaches Sports Law at her alma mater. Hartley has worked with the Olympic movement, collegiate and professional sports, national governing bodies, and assisted in the development of SafeSport. She continues to work as a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner in the sports and entertainment, business, and higher education sectors.
The event covered significant ground, with Hartley providing a high-level overview of the Olympic legal frameworks and moving on to specific legal issues from Paris, including the Jordan Chiles case, gender eligibility challenges relating to female boxers, Dutch Federation and International Olympic Committee (IOC) permittance of a convicted rapist to participate, Paralympic rule of play violations and Paralympic classification disputes.
Hartley began by describing the Olympic history and legal framework. The Olympics have a triangular governance structure, where the IOC operates as an international, non-governmental organization responsible for organizing the Games and governing national Olympic Committees. National Olympic committees and international sports federations sit underneath the IOC. National committees are responsible for developing Olympic sports within their country and fielding Olympic teams, while international federations are responsible for the management of their individual sport. Each country then has a national governing body for each sport, which runs the development of that sport within their country, from grassroots programming to elite athlete development. On the Paralympic side, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) operates independently of the IOC. National Paralympic committees, international federations, and various organizations for sport for the disabled operate within the IPC structure. Paralympic athletes compete within an IPC classification system that aims to have athletes with similar physical challenges competing against each other, to create as level a playing field as possible. Participating athletes have agreed to abide by all the rules of their national governing bodies, national Olympic or Paralympic committees, their international federations, the IOC or IPC, and the World Anti-Doping Code.
Hartley explained that there are often two main types of challenges brought before the Olympics begin: team selection challenges and doping challenges. This year, Caitlin Clark and Erin Matson were notable absences from Team USA, but neither of them brought legal challenges regarding their omissions. The doping front was also relatively quiet in the lead-up to the Paris Games and during the Games themselves, though the American figure skating team from Beijing 2022 was finally awarded its gold medals in Paris after Kamila Valieva of Russia was charged with an anti-doping rules violation, causing the Russian team to be stripped of their medals.
Hartley shared that the most high-profile Team USA litigation from Paris involved a challenge on behalf of gymnast Jordan Chiles to the decision to revoke the bronze medal awarded to her. The two-time Olympian competed in the floor exercise final and was originally awarded a score which put her in fifth place, but Jordan’s coach submitted an inquiry challenging the difficulty score awarded to the routine – specifically, to ensure credit was given for one of her leaps. The judges accepted the inquiry, which moved Jordan into third place over Romanian gymnast Ana Barbosu, who thought she had secured the bronze medal. Another inquiry was made by the Romanian coaches to contest an out of bounds penalty on behalf of Sabrina Voinea, but that inquiry was unsuccessful and Sabrina was relegated to fifth place. Jordan received the bronze medal at the medal ceremony, but the Romanian Gymnastics Federation later appealed the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), arguing that Jordan’s coaches made the inquiry too late – 1 minute and 4 seconds after the score was awarded, which fell outside the 1-minute window allowed by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG). The Romanian Gymnastics Federation asked CAS to review both the out of bounds penalty for Sabrina Voinea and the timeliness of Jordan’s inquiry. CAS agreed to review the inquiry timeliness, but declined to review the out-of-bounds penalty because it was an “on-the-field” decision as opposed to a procedural challenge. The CAS does not review “field of play” decisions because that is best left to the expertise and decision of judges and officials, but they will review procedural challenges for errors of law or arbitrary processes. The Romanians presented evidence of the inquiry’s tardiness to the CAS, which reallocated the medal to Ana Barbosu. However, Jordan recently submitted an appeal to the Swiss Federal Tribunal, where appeals to CAS rulings are heard, asserting two grounds for overturning the CAS decision. First, Jordan argued that there was an undisclosed conflict of interest involving one of the arbitrators (who had served as counsel for Romania for years prior to and during the Games), and, second, Jordan argued that she was denied due process by CAS’s refusal to consider new video evidence showing that her inquiry was in fact submitted within the 1-minute window. Negotiations on this matter are ongoing, but it could be a couple of years before a resolution is reached.
Another high-profile dispute unpacked by Hartley involved two female Olympic boxers in Paris. On social media, public figures and fellow competitors pointed the finger at female boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, asserting that they were men, which ignited a firestorm of backlash against the athletes. In reality, we know very little about the factual situation facing these boxers. The bottom line is that, despite the misinformation online, there is no public evidence to suggest that Khelif and Yu-Ting are not women. The backlash originated from statements by the President of the International Boxing Association (IBA) in a press conference during the Games. Importantly, the IBA is no longer the international federation for boxing (the IOC ran boxing itself in Paris) because the IBA was plagued by pervasive corruption and governance issues. In a press conference that he called, the IBA President claimed to have evidence that Khelif and Yu-Ting have XY (male) chromosomes and were disqualified from the 2023 world championships because they failed a gender eligibility test; yet, the IBA provided no details regarding what tests were performed, what the results were, or any proof that the athletes had XY chromosomes. These accusations are part of a long history of questioning the sex of dominant female athletes – particularly women of color – through subjective, invasive, and reprehensible means ranging from “naked parades” to full-on DNA testing. For all of the apparent contention online, there are no ongoing legal proceedings challenging Khelif or Yu-Ting’s eligibility to compete as women, though Khelif did file a formal complaint for the cyber harassment she endured.
In addition to legal questions about who sets the boundaries of sex classifications and how, Hartley noted that athlete safety was also a concern at the Paris Games. Dutch athlete Steve van de Velde was approved for competition by the Dutch Olympic Committee, despite serving 13 months in jail following his conviction of raping a 12-year-old girl in 2016. The IOC allowed him to compete because neither the IOC nor the Dutch Olympic Committee had rules against convicted sex criminals participating in the Games. The Dutch Federation defended its decision on the grounds that van de Velde had completed his sentence and was not at risk of re-offending. Still, housing an athlete convicted of raping a minor in the Olympic Village was a hotly contested decision. If van de Velde were a Team USA athlete, the outcome would have looked quite different. The USOPC established the U.S. Center for SafeSport in 2018 to educate stakeholders on how to prevent and report misconduct and abuse, to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct, and to adjudicate those claims. If an American athlete were convicted of a sexual crime, a lifetime ban from their sport would be almost guaranteed. Under the SafeSport Code, even being charged with criminal conduct banned under the SafeSport Code could trigger a ban under the Code, and only a not guilty adjudication would reestablish the athlete’s right to compete.
Two weeks after the conclusion of the Olympic Games, the Paralympics commenced in Paris, raising legal issues of its own. Professor Hartley described two issues of particular interest. First, she told the story of Giacomo Perini, an Italian Paralympic rower, who was disqualified after officials found a cell phone in his boat, which is a prohibited item. Even though there was no evidence that Perini used the phone to his advantage during the race (and if anything, the extra weight could have slowed him down), Perini was found to have violated the rules of competition by having the prohibited item in his boat and thus was stripped of his medal. Next, Hartley described the Paralympic classification system generally and how misclassification disputes are commonplace at the Paralympics. For athletes whose disabilities have a subjective element (like degree of visual impairment), there is some incentive to be classified at a higher level of physical disability in order to obtain a competitive advantage. This can give rise to litigation. The best example of this in Paris involved Turkish runner Serkan Yildirim, whose visual impairment classification was put “under review” after last year’s World Championships. That status barred him from participating in the Paralympics; however, he sought a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the ban, which was successful and allowed him to compete. After winning gold in Paris, a subsequent appeal overturned the injunction and Yildirim’s gold medal was revoked.
Overall, Professor Hartley said that this Olympics was relatively quiet in the courts, though the legal challenges that did arise were quite contentious. She theorizes that this was due in part to the joy of participants getting the full Olympic experience after COVID-19 left the Tokyo and Beijing Games without spectators and tense. Hartley looks forward to experiencing LA 2028 on home turf after the 2026 Winter Games in Italy.
Delaney Sniffen is a 2L at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she is President of the Virginia Sports & Entertainment Society and Assistant Managing Editor of the Virginia Sports & Entertainment Law Journal. In addition to her work in the sports & entertainment sector, she is President of the North Grounds Track Club, an editorial member of the Virginia Journal of Law & Politics, a member of the Student Dialogue Fellowship, and an Investigator on the University Judiciary Committee. Sniffen graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2023 with a B.S. in Rehabilitation Science and served as President of Pitt’s rowing team.
