By: Peter Carlisle
SELJ is honored to feature CAS and the Breakdown of Olympic Dispute Resolution: How the Chiles Case Reveals the Structural Gap Between Arbitration and Judicial Review written by Peter Carlisle in Volume 15, Issue 2. Carlisle is a long-time athlete rights advocate who has represented Olympic athletes for more than 25 years. He is the Managing Director of Octagon’s Olympics & Action Sports Division, a lawyer, and a former adjunct professor of sports law. The author does not represent Jordan Chiles, or any parties involved in the arbitration discussed herein. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the company, clients, or any other individuals. The author is especially grateful to Drew Johnson for his thoughtful input and support in the preparation of this article.
Below is the article’s introduction, click here to continue reading the full article. Hard copies of the entire Issue may be purchased via Amazon.
Introduction
The Olympic movement often cites the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) as evidence that international sport possesses a sophisticated and independent system of legal oversight. Athletes are told that when disputes arise during the Olympic Games, their claims will be heard by competent, neutral arbitrators under established, reliable procedure. Those decisions are also expected to be subject to judicial review before the Swiss Federal Supreme Court (SFT). Although CAS awards are formally subject to review before the SFT, that process is rarely accessible to athletes, and the structure of international arbitration places strict limits on the scope of judicial review. As a result, the system’s safeguards are more limited than they appear, leaving athletes with far less meaningful recourse than they are led to expect.
The arbitration arising from the women’s floor exercise final at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games provides a concrete case to examine these issues. Instead of confirming the system’s safeguards operate as intended, it reveals the limits of those safeguards and the questions that follow.
Judicial Alchemy: How Cascading Procedural Failures Upended the Jordan Chiles Arbitration and Rewrote Olympic History examined the CAS proceedings that resulted in Jordan Chiles being stripped of her Olympic bronze medal and argued the arbitration was shaped by a series of procedural failures that distorted the adjudicative process.[1] That analysis concluded the only meaningful opportunity to correct those failures lay with the SFT, the sole court with jurisdiction to review CAS awards.[2] If the SFT were willing to set aside the decision, the Olympic dispute resolution system might still demonstrate an ability to correct serious procedural breakdowns; if it were not, the implications would extend well beyond a single medal dispute. In a series of decisions addressing challenges and revision requests arising from the arbitration, the SFT declined to annul the CAS award and accepted the arbitration as legally valid under Article 190 of the Swiss Private International Law Act (PILA). Although the Court permitted limited revision based on newly discovered evidence and remanded the case to the CAS tribunal for reconsideration of a narrow factual issue, it did so without revisiting the procedural failures that shaped the arbitration.
The Chiles case exposes a structural gap in Olympic dispute resolution. Olympic arbitrations conducted before the CAS Ad Hoc Division (AHD) during the Games operate under extraordinary conditions, including compressed timelines and limited evidentiary development. Those proceedings are governed by procedural rules designed to preserve fairness under time pressure, but panels retain broad discretion which may depart from those rules. These conditions affect not only the speed of decision-making but also the reliability of the process. By contrast, the SFT’s review is designed for conventional commercial arbitrations conducted under more stable conditions. Because the SFT must accept the factual record established by the arbitral tribunal and may intervene only on narrow procedural grounds, it reviews Olympic CAS awards within a structure that assumes procedural safeguards which often do not exist in Olympic proceedings.
The result is a system in which arbitrations marked by significant procedural distortions are paired with a judicial review mechanism incapable of correcting them. The Chiles litigation illustrates how the Olympic dispute resolution system can preserve the appearance of judicial review while leaving intact the procedural structure that produced the disputed outcome, making similar outcomes under the current structure not just possible, but difficult to correct when they occur.
In Olympic dispute resolution, the conditions under which proceedings occur shape the arbitral record, on which judicial review depends; that record defines the scope of review, and the limits of such review restrict the ability to correct error.
The discussion is organized in four parts. Part I revisits the CAS arbitration examined in Judicial Alchemy, focusing on the procedural context of Olympic arbitration and the panel’s reasoning in departing from the field-of-play doctrine. Part II addresses the limits of judicial review under Article 190 PILA and the restricted role of the SFT. Part III examines the structural imbalance revealed by the Chiles case. Part IV considers the broader implications of that imbalance for the legitimacy and future governance of Olympic dispute resolution.
Interested in reading more? Click here to access the full article.
Interested in reading Carlisle’s blog post After “Judicial Alchemy:” The Systemic Failures the Swiss Court Ignored in the Jordan Chiles Case? Click here to access the blog post.
[1] Peter Carlisle, Judicial Alchemy: How Cascading Procedural Failures Upended the Jordan Chiles Arbitration and Rewrote Olympic History, 14 Ariz. St. Sports & Ent. L.J. 141 (2025) [hereinafter Judicial Alchemy].
[2] Id.
