Winter Olympics: snowboard judge admits ‘Maradona, Hand of God’ error cost Su Yiming slopestyle gold
- Iztok Sumatic tells ‘snowboard bible’ Whitelines if judges had seen gold winner Max Parrot’s double-knee grab, he would have received a different score
- Su Yiming fans react with a mixture of anger and resignation, saying ‘it’s too late’ or urging the rider to file a complaint
Fans of Chinese teen snowboard sensation Su Yiming expressed feelings of anger and resignation after the chief judge at the Beijing Winter Olympics admitted a “Maradona, Hand of God” mistake gave slopestyle gold medal winner Max Parrot a higher score than he deserved.
Iztok Sumatic told Whitelines.com, the online “snowboard bible”, that judges failed to pick up a mistake made by Canadian Parrot on his way to scoring 90.96 on his second run on Monday. It was enough to give him the gold over 17-year-old former child actor Su, who also turned in a sizzling second run for his 88.70.
Canadian Mark McMorris finished third. The story on Weibo had more than 240 million views, with fans either saying “it’s too late to do anything now”, or urging Su to file a complaint.
Replays of Parrot’s run showed a double-knee grab on the off-axis “twisted sister” kicker halfway down the course, which should have affected his score. And Sumatic admitted this was the case in an interview with Whitelines’ Tristan Kennedy, saying the judges were not given the camera angles seen by viewers.
“I read an article by one of your colleagues on Whitelines where he compared it to Maradona scoring the Hand of God goal in Mexico ’86,” Sumatic said. “It was like that. The referee hadn’t seen it, but he made a decision, and you can’t change it afterwards. It’s live scoring – we have to score from the live feeds. That was the angle we were given, and it felt like a legit trick from that point of view.
“It would be different scores yes,” Sumatic said when asked if the score would have been different had judges seen the mistake. “But there are so many factors. All I can say, in Max’s defence, regarding this specific run, is that it was still an insane run. He killed it, especially on the rails.”
Sumatic said the competition had six section judges, two per feature, and three overall impression judges. He said all judges were highly experienced in their field.
At the 1986 Fifa World Cup in Mexico, Argentina captain Diego Maradona scored a goal with his hand against England in the quarter-finals, later dubbing it the “Hand of God”. Argentina won the match 2-1 and went on to win the World Cup.
Su, a former child actor who was in Tsui Hark’s 2014 film The Taking of Tiger Mountain, later praised the judges and said he was looking forward to more success. But some of his fans want the rider to take action against the judges and reverse the decision.
“Please file a complaint with the national team coaches and officials, protect the rights and interests of our players, and be tough. Don’t suffer in this regard all day long and make your own people sad,” wrote one Weibo reader.
Another wrote: “I was very suspicious at the time, because whether it was the live audience, the commentator, or the audience watching the TV replay, they all saw that there was a mistake, so there was this doubt. The referee didn’t see it in the ‘replay’ and I really don’t know how to explain it.”
Sumatic was asked why the judges were unable to receive the correct feed but he refused to create more controversy.
“I can’t comment on that now,” Sumatic was quoted as saying. “I don’t want to create a potential environment that could affect our judging. We have another 10 days where we’re going to judge eight competitions – qualis and finals in half-pipe and then in big air – and we should be focused on judging right now, and not on all this drama.
“I don’t want to open this Pandora’s box to put any extra pressure on my team, or create something that would be a bone for media, or social media. This would just keep on going. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to give interviews to many people.”
Su, who displayed technical brilliance during his runs in the slopestyle, has another chance for gold when he competes in the men’s big air competition on Monday and Tuesday.
In their report of the slopestyle, Whitelines said Parrot did not deserve the gold medal because of the mistake, which pretty much reflected the views of thousands of snowboard fans who watched the competition.
For Parrot, the gold was an emotional victory after a difficult four years. He is one of the giants of snowboarding but in December, 2018, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma blood cancer. After taking chemotherapy for six months, he returned to the sport and won big air gold at the X-Games in September 2019.
