It's final

Paul Hamm will keep gold medal after court rejects South Korean appeal

NEW YORK (AP) -- For weeks, gymnast Paul Hamm's Olympic gold medal sat in a drawer at his boyhood home in Wisconsin, carefully tucked inside a sock so it wouldn't be scratched or damaged. There was, after all, a chance he'd have to give it to someone else.

Now, two months after it was first draped around his neck, the gold medal is his -- finally and forever.

Sports' highest court rejected an appeal from a South Korean gymnast on Thursday, ruling that Hamm is the rightful champion in the men's all-around competition at the Athens Games. The verdict is final and cannot be appealed.

"It feels like it's mine now. If I were to damage it in any way, it wouldn't be going to anyone else. If I ruin it, it's mine to ruin," Hamm said. "Now I'll be able to put it in a safe place and leave it there."

And leave the whole mess behind him.

"There's been a lot of fighting for this medal," he said. "I think it'll mean that much more, that I'll be able to keep it for the rest of my life."

The decision by a three-judge panel from the Court of Arbitration for Sport, in Lausanne, Switzerland, ends a tussle that began when South Korea's Yang Tae-young claimed a scoring error had cost him the victory. Yang asked the court to order international gymnastics officials to change the results and adjust the medal rankings accordingly, giving him the gold and Hamm the silver.

In dismissing the appeal, CAS arbitrators said the Korean protest was submitted too late, and that the court was not in a position to correct results, anyway. The decision leaves Hamm with gold and Yang with bronze. Kim Dae-eun of South Korea will keep the silver.

"The solution for error, either way, lies within the framework of the sport's own rules" and does not allow for a judge or arbitrator to step in later, the panel said. "An error identified with the benefit of hindsight, whether admitted or not, cannot be a ground for reversing a result of a competition."

Hamm, in New York with the medal, said he had been optimistic after the Sept. 27 CAS hearing in Lausanne and he slept soundly Wednesday night.

He awoke at 6:15 a.m. Thursday to find a message from his agent, Sheryl Shade.

"It just said, `The medal ranking is going to stay,"' said Hamm, who immediately called his girlfriend with the news.

"This is obviously a great day for me," he said. "The decision from CAS confirms what I've always felt in my heart, which is that I was champion that night and the Olympic gold medalist. I competed my heart out. I'll put this behind me and move on."

That's what Yang wants, too.

"I hoped for a good decision, but I also didn't rule out a decision not in favor of me," he said in Seoul. "I don't want to think about it any more."

Few could have imagined such a debacle when Hamm stood atop the podium in Athens on Aug. 18, the first American man to win gymnastics' biggest prize. The defending world champion made one of the most spectacular comebacks in the sport's history, rallying from 12th place with just two events to go and winning the gold medal with a dazzling high bar routine that brought the audience to its feet.

But two days later, the International Gymnastics Federation announced Yang had been wrongly docked a tenth of a point on his second-to-last routine, the parallel bars.

Yang finished third, 0.049 points behind Hamm. The extra 0.100 would have put Yang on top, 0.051 points ahead of the American, assuming everything in the final rotation played out the same way -- a big if.

FIG suspended three judges but said repeatedly it would not change the results because the South Koreans didn't protest until after the meet. That didn't stop the chaos, though.

The South Koreans approached both the U.S. Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee in hopes of getting Yang a gold medal. It brought back memories of the figure skating scandal at the Salt Lake City Games in 2002, when a Canadian pair were given duplicate gold medals after a French judge said she had been "pressured" to put a Russian couple ahead of them.

There were no signs of impropriety in this case, and IOC president Jacques Rogge flatly refused to even consider a second gold medal.

Then FIG president Bruno Grandi wrote Hamm a letter and asked him to surrender the gold medal voluntarily. Buoyed by that, Yang filed an appeal with CAS on the final day of the games.

"That was probably the toughest time for me," Hamm said of getting Grandi's letter.

After staying largely silent the first few days of the controversy, the USOC rallied to Hamm's defense, including paying his legal expenses.

"We are exceptionally pleased with the decision," said Jim Scherr, the USOC's chief executive.

Hamm said he just wants to head back to his hometown of Waukesha, Wis., and savor the gold.

"This is probably the most sought-after medal of the Olympics," he said, holding it up. "Of all time maybe."