OLYMPICS Decision is due on Hamm gold

A ruling today will end the two-month gymnastics dispute.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Paul Hamm is finally going to have an answer for everyone who asks if he's going to be able to keep his Olympic gold medal.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, was scheduled to announce a decision today that will bring an end to the two-month tussle over the gold medal from the men's Olympic all-around.
"I'm obviously looking forward to this whole thing being done with," Hamm said. "I wouldn't consider this [process] to be a pain, but it's always something that's being discussed, whether it's with my family and friends or people I run into on the street. People say, 'Whatever happened with that medal thing?' "
Hamm won the gold at the Athens Olympics on Aug. 18 with one of the most spectacular comebacks in the sport's history, rallying from 12th place with only two events remaining.
Scoring error
But two days later, gymnastics officials discovered that Yang Tae-Young of South Korea had been wrongly docked a tenth of a point on his second-to-last routine, the parallel bars. Yang ended up with the bronze, 0.049 points behind Hamm. Add that extra 0.100, though, and Yang would have finished 0.051 points ahead of the American.
That, however, assumes everything in the final rotation played out the same way -- a big if.
The International Gymnastics Federation acknowledged the error and suspended three judges. But it said repeatedly it would not change the results because the South Koreans didn't protest until after the meet.
Pressure
That didn't stop the South Koreans from pressing their case, though. They appealed to the U.S. Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee, but IOC president Jacques Rogge flatly refused to even consider the idea of giving Yang a gold medal.
Then FIG president Bruno Grandi confused the issue, writing a letter to Hamm and asking him to surrender the gold medal voluntarily. In the letter, Grandi wrote, "The true winner of the all-around competition is Yang Tae-young."
Buoyed by that statement, Yang filed an appeal on the final day of the games with CAS -- the sports world's highest court and final authority on Olympic matters.
"There are a lot of great memories for me of Athens and I'll never forget them," Hamm said. "But there are also times in Athens that I just wished I was home."