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

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.