The case of Jordan Chiles and her contested medal raises an interesting question: Why would any lawyer who prizes his reputation accept a job with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, that illegitimate warren that the International Olympic Committee, oligarchs and other dealers in suitcases of cash use as a legal veneer?

The answer must be more than just free tickets. Fees!

For lending his reputation to CAS’s secretive, opaque and stinking-as-a-spoiled-oyster star chamber, the honorable presiding arbitrator Hamid Gharavi got to lunge at the langoustine-piled ice sculptures for two weeks in Paris and charge $300 to $600 per hour for rank conflicts of interest. What a legal lark to be a CAS judge and to lord it over athletes with rulings such as the banning of a Jamaican hammer thrower for a technical failure in her entry paperwork committed during a hurricane outage. Or, in the case of Gharavi, the stripping of gymnast Chiles’s bronze medal over an alleged four-second lapse by U.S. officials in filing a scoring appeal on her behalf, so you can give it to your longtime legal client, Romania, that trove of billable hours.

Four seconds – that was the basis the CAS panel used to revoke the bronze medal in floor exercise awarded to Chiles by an actual panel of Olympic gymnastics judges who were there. Gharavi’s panel gave it to Ana Barbosu of Romania, and you knew the verdict reeked of corruption, even if you just didn’t know quite where to look for it. The answer turned out to be in the most arrogantly corrupt place, as it always does with IOC-related matters: inside the power center. The three-man CAS panel led by Gharavi refused to reevaluate its decision even though new video evidence apparently shows the scoring appeal was filed within the required one minute at the competition. CAS told USA Gymnastics that the “rules do not allow for an arbitral award to be reconsidered even when conclusive new evidence is presented.”

This is a court? No, actually, it’s not. It’s a sinecure for cronies and insiders, one established, funded and steered by the IOC and various sports federations as cover, housed in the Palais de Beaulieu in Lausanne, Switzerland. It’s as byzantine and riddled with mysterious purposes and politics as a Templar tunnel. As great German investigative journalist Grit Hartmann pointed out in a 2021 expose of CAS, in what other legal world do you see judges appointed by their most frequent litigants?

Let’s meet the gents who overrode the gymnastics judges on the basis of four seconds that apparently did not even elapse. The “president” of the panel is Gharavi, a noted international investment lawyer who has represented sovereign states such as Turkey and Albania in commercial disputes. He has represented Romania at least three times, according to his firm, and is currently working with its government counsel on cases before the World Bank, according to an aghast inquiry posted on the website of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution.

Interestingly, Gharavi may also have a soft spot for Russia, judging by some of his other CAS involvements. Gharavi was Russia’s choice for a CAS arbitrator during its fight over the World Anti-Doping Agency’s four-year ban for systemic doping at the Sochi Winter Games. (In CAS procedures, each side gets to nominate a “judge.”). In 2018, Gharavi and his two other CAS panel colleagues overturned 28 Russian suspensions for purported lack of evidence and reinstated nine medals. In 2020, Gharavi and the panel whacked the four-year ban imposed by WADA in half – without any clear explanation – to the applause of Vladimir Putin. It also weakened a provision banning Russian authorities from attending the Olympics.

A lawyer for Russian whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov, Jim Walden, called the decision “nonsensical” and observed, “Despite overwhelming proof of corruption, doping fraud and obstruction of justice … CAS has once again proven itself unwilling and unable to meaningfully deal with systematic and long-standing criminality by Russia.”

Another well-known CAS veteran on the Chiles appeal panel was Philippe Sands. He is a British-French lawyer whom you may have seen on television or in Vanity Fair. Sands is a noted professor, author and commentator who has taught at University College London and Harvard Law. Sands is also a nutter for soccer. He has been a CAS arbitrator since 2011, and he sat on a CAS panel that infamously annulled a lifetime suspension for FIFA official Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar for bald-faced bribery, citing lack of evidence, even though there was so very much evidence that he subsequently received a second lifetime ban from FIFA. In 2023, French authorities issued a warrant for his arrest for corruption related to the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar.

The third member of this noble triumvirate of a panel is Lu Song of China. He is an arbitrator of investment disputes, a member of the International Commercial Expert Committee of China’s Supreme People’s Court and apparently well known in Geneva arbitration circles. China, of course, is noted for its Olympic integrity.

The moral of these rich little character studies: Don’t hire an arbitrator associated with CAS. You may not know whom he really works for – and you can’t possibly know what’s in his briefcase under the table or in his Singapore bank account.

There are so many problems with CAS that it’s hard to know where to begin, but you might start at the very, very top, where IOC Vice President John Coates also serves as president of the council that rules CAS. Coates, you may recall, is the palmy guy who helped to buy the 2000 Olympics for Sydney by promising funds to African officials. Is it any wonder that in an organization headed by Coates, the same old friendly arbiters tend to receive most of the appointments? In 2021, London law company Morgan Sports Law analyzed 20 years of CAS decisions and found just 14 male arbiters had been appointed more than 100 times. Among other things, there are almost no female arbitrators.

These slack-chinned, necktie-smooth, multi-passported supremos almost never rule in favor of individual athletes, who tend to lack funds. How curious. Sports federations, those pure-as-crystal organizations, are “the only class of appellants to win more cases than they lose” in front of CAS, according to an investigation by Swedish international law professor Johan Lindholm in his 2019 book, “The Court of Arbitration for Sport and Its Jurisprudence.”

This isn’t arbitration – arbitration is independent. This is involuntary surrender to chicanery. USA Gymnastics has a route left for appeal: the Swiss courts. CAS could be challenged in the Swiss Supreme Court on the basis that it violated “elementary procedural rules,” such as the right to a fair hearing, or acted with basic “incompatibility” with Swiss law. CAS is perpetually guilty on all counts. The Swiss courts should clean up the magisterial, back-scratchy mess that it has allowed to flourish in Lausanne.