On February 22, 2026, the closing ceremony wrapped up the 2026 Winter Olympic Games in Milano Cortina, Italy. In the legal world, however, another Olympics-related contest, coming from one of Italy’s northern neighbors, claimed the spotlight.
The Swiss Federal Tribunal (the “Court”) granted American gymnast Jordan Chiles’ request for revision of the arbitral award rendered by a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) arbitral tribunal regarding the women’s artistic gymnastics floor exercise final at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. The case, which involved extraordinary circumstances, provides a valuable lesson for anyone arbitrating in Switzerland. Although this article focuses on the Court’s decision about late-discovered evidence, it is important to note that the Court rejected allegations of conflict of interest involving one of the arbitrators.[1]
Factual Background
At the 2024 Paris Olympics women’s floor exercise final on August 5, 2024, Jordan Chiles initially received a score of 13.666. After her coach filed a challenge regarding the degree of difficulty, the competition’s judges raised her score to 13.766 – placing her ahead of Romania’s Ana Maria Bărbosu (13.700) and Sabrina Maneca-Voinea (13.700 after a 0.1 deduction for stepping out of bounds). Chiles was then awarded the bronze medal.
On August 6, 2024, the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, Bărbosu, and Maneca-Voinea challenged the result before the CAS Ad Hoc Division for the Olympic Games, arguing that Chiles’s inquiry was submitted after expiration of the one-minute deadline provided in the applicable regulations.[2]
On August 10, 2024, the CAS Arbitral Tribunal (the “Tribunal”) communicated the operative part of its Award to the parties. The Tribunal found that Chiles’ inquiry was filed one minute and four seconds after the score announcement, ruled it untimely, and reinstated Chiles’ original score of 13.666 (the “Award”), and thus stripped her of a bronze medal.[3]
On August 11, 2024, Chiles uncovered video footage suggesting her coach’s inquiry may have been timely. Court records indicate that Chiles spoke with some Netflix producers who were filming a documentary during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games to confirm that additional footage existed, and obtained a copy of such footage. On the same day, August 11, 2024, Chiles submitted the video footage to the Tribunal. Under the applicable CAS Rules, the Tribunal could not consider the video footage because it was submitted after the operative part of the Award was issued. Accordingly, the Tribunal sent the full award to the parties on August 14, 2024.
Unable to submit new evidence to the CAS tribunal, Chiles (and USA Gymnastics) filed a motion to set aside the Award and a “request for review” of the Award in the Swiss Court.[4] The latter procedure allows a party, in limited circumstances, to seek reconsideration of an arbitral award in court based on the discovery of new facts or evidence.
The decisions of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court
The motions filed by Chiles were intertwined: in the motion to set aside, Chiles alleged violation of her right to be heard because the Tribunal did not consider the video footage submitted on August 11; and in the “request for review,” she alleged that the video footage was uncovered after the Award was issued by the Tribunal (as explained below).
The Court applied Swiss arbitration law to decide Chiles’ applications. Although the arbitration proceedings were conducted in Paris during the Olympics, Article 7 of the Arbitration Rules for the Olympic Games (the “Rules”) establishes Lausanne, Switzerland as the legal seat of the arbitration. The Court therefore correctly recognized Lausanne as the seat, consistent with the prevailing view that an arbitral tribunal may conduct procedural acts outside of the physical seat without affecting the legal place of the arbitration.[5] The express provision in the Rules empowering the arbitral tribunal to conduct proceedings at the site of the Olympics (or any other place) further reinforces this conclusion.[6]
Accordingly, the Court was correct to apply Swiss arbitration law—the lex arbitri— following the modern approach that courts sitting in the primary jurisdiction (i.e., reviewing awards made within their curial jurisdiction) shall apply their own domestic arbitration law, and not the New York Convention in deciding whether to set aside an award.[7]
The Court denied Chiles’s application to set aside the Award, finding that the award became final when the tribunal transmitted the operative part to the parties on August 10, 2024, in accordance with Article 19 of the Rules. That the Tribunal sent the full Award with reasons several days later, on August 14, was irrelevant for determining whether the Tribunal could consider the video footage.
A tribunal’s power to revisit its own award is very limited, and generally determined by the applicable arbitration rules and the law of the seat.[8] In this case, the Rules did not provide for any remedy of the sort, referring only to “recourse available in certain circumstances pursuant to Swiss Law,” as per Article 21 of the Rules. Under the circumstances, the Tribunal lacked authority to review its previous findings in light of the video footage because that new evidence was submitted by Chiles after the award was rendered.
In contrast to the Rules, however, Swiss Law provides a distinctive remedy particularly suited to Chiles’ case. Article 190(a) of the Swiss Private International Law Act (PILA) provides that “[a] party may request a review of an award if (…) it has subsequently become aware of significant facts or uncovered decisive evidence which it could not have produced in the earlier proceedings despite exercising due diligence….” Thus, under Swiss Law, revision of arbitral awards is available as a secondary, subsidiary means of recourse, under specific circumstances – including when a party uncovers previously non-discoverable evidence after the tribunal issues the arbitral award.[9-10]
Article 190(a) was introduced in the 2021 revision of PILA and it is a distinguishing feature of Swiss arbitration law.[11] The UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration Model Law and the U.S. Federal Arbitration Act, for example, do not contain similar provisions. As is common in many jurisdictions, neither of those regimes allows for consideration of new evidence after an arbitral tribunal issues its award. Although the Swiss regime may seem new to non-Swiss attorneys, commentators suggest that this feature existed in Swiss law even before the 2021 revision of the Swiss PILA.[12]
If an application for review succeeds, Swiss courts will set aside the arbitral award and remit the case back to the arbitral tribunal, which will have the power to modify or confirm its previous finding in light of the new evidence, effectively reopening the record.[13] Tribunals will have authority under Swiss law to repeat the procedure (and assess new facts and arguments) only to the extent that the new evidence affects its prior decision.[14-15] If, for whatever reason, the arbitral tribunal cannot be fully reconstituted, Swiss Law determines that the rules for replacement of arbitrators shall apply.[16]
Against this legal background, the Court granted Chiles’ application for revision under Article 190(a) of the Swiss PILA, finding that she could not have uncovered the video during the arbitral proceedings, and that the video may represent decisive evidence for the case. Upon application by Chiles, a reconstituted tribunal will be tasked to determine whether the video proves that she filed the inquiry within the applicable one-minute deadline.
Conclusion
Jordan Chiles’ case involves extraordinary circumstances. The arbitration was conducted in four days, due to the highly demanding timeframe of Olympic Games arbitration. The Tribunal had to issue the operative part of the Award quickly, and it could not consider subsequently discovered evidence, even though the new evidence was discovered and submitted before the Tribunal sent the full text of its Award with reasons. The inability of the Tribunal to consider the new evidence is precisely what provided an opening for the Court to review the award and, upon finding that Chiles acted diligently and that the new evidence might affect the outcome, to remand the case for further consideration in arbitration.
The possibility to apply for revision under Article 190(a) of the Swiss PILA provides a rare opportunity to revisit the merits of an arbitral award in circumstances where the arbitrators did not exceed their powers, and there were no other procedural irregularities that would typically support vacatur. The PILA reflects a policy choice made by Switzerland, tempering the finality of arbitral awards in situations where the party could not rely on potentially decisive evidence during the proceedings. In those circumstances, Swiss law purposefully opts to allow the revision of an award.
The case provides a cautionary tale for parties arbitrating in Switzerland or even elsewhere if Swiss law provides the lex arbitri. This precedent is particularly relevant for the many sports that mandatorily arbitrate under the CAS Appeals Arbitration System (like soccer) or one of the CAS Ad Hoc Divisions (like the Olympic Games), for which the proceedings are automatically seated in Lausanne, Switzerland. The same is true for commercial parties who elect to arbitrate disputes in Switzerland.
The case also highlights that arbitrators have a duty to rule in accordance with the evidence presented to them during the proceedings, as did the Tribunal in Jordan Chiles’ case—and that compliance with that duty does not always preclude later review of an award.
*We want to thank legal intern Gabriel Bonfim for his contributions to this blog post.
Footnotes
[1] On that topic, the chair of the arbitral tribunal gave an interview to the Global Arbitration Review (GAR) after the Court issued its decision, which can be found here: https://globalarbitrationreview.com/article/could-break-anyone-gharavi-opens-about-jordan-chiles-case. CAS itself also addressed the topic in a short statement, which is reproduced in the GAR interview.
[2] Maneca-Voinea also challenged her score, arguing that she did not step out of bounds.
[3] The Tribunal also found that it could not review whether Maneca-Voinea stepped out of bounds, as this finding is part of the non-justiciable rules of the game, by application of the field-of-play doctrine.
[4] Maneca-Voinea and the Romanian Gymnastics Federation also moved to set aside the Award. The Court accepted the arbitral tribunal’s finding that a decision on whether Maneca-Voinea stepped out of bounds is part of the non-justiciable rules of the game. This post focuses on Jordan Chiles’s case, which has broader implications for sports arbitrations and international commercial arbitrations seated in Switzerland. Notably, under CAS Rules, all CAS arbitrations, Olympic and otherwise, are seated in Switzerland.
[5] See Gary B. Born, International Commercial Arbitration §11.03[E] (3d ed. 2021) (updated Feb. 2024) (Kluwer Arb.), https://www.kluwerarbitration.com/document/TOC-Born-2021 (collecting authorities).
[6] Article 7 of the Rules provides that “the ad hoc Division and each Panel may carry out all the actions which fall within their mission at the site of the Olympic Games or in any other place they deem appropriate.”
[7] The New York Convention establishes grounds for a court to deny recognition of a foreign arbitral award, Art. V, but it does not address set-aside or vacatur, which is therefore left to the local arbitration law of the primary jurisdiction (i.e., the seat of arbitration). See Corporación AIC S.A. v Hidroeléctrica Santa Rita S.A., 66 F.4th 876 (11th Cir. 2023).
[8] The modern approach to the functus officio doctrine provides that an arbitral tribunal will only truly be functus officio after all possibilities to correct, interpret, or supplement an award have been foreclosed, by the passage of time or otherwise. See Born, supra, §24.02[E] (suggesting that, “[a]fter making its final award, however, the tribunal’s powers are restricted to a very limited range of actions, defined principally by reference to corrections and interpretations of its award”).
[9] Viktor Előd Cserép, Revision of Arbitral Awards Beyond the Model Law: “Retrial” in Arbitration? pp. 81–82 (Int’l Arb. L. Libr., vol. 77, 2025), https://www.kluwerarbitration.com/document/TOC-Cserep-2026
[10] Other grounds for review under Article 190(a) of the Swiss PILA include: (1) when criminal proceedings have established that the arbitral award was influenced to the detriment of the party concerned by a felony or misdemeanor; and (2) when a party discovers new evidence regarding arbitrators’ independence or impartiality.
[11] Other European jurisdictions, and arbitrations under the ICSID Convention, may contain comparable features. For a detailed report on revision as a recourse against arbitral awards, see Cserép, supra, pp. 77-108
[12] Cserép, supra, p. 282 (citing case law from the Swiss Federal Tribunal dating back to 1992)
[13] Ibid.
[14] Id., at 288
[15] The review procedure does raise questions about compatibility with the functus officio doctrine. As explained above, an arbitral tribunal is generally considered to have concluded its mandate after issuing its award, with limited powers extending beyond that act. Swiss Law, however, considers that an arbitral tribunal will not have concluded its mandate when a request for review is granted, empowering the tribunal to review its previous findings in light of the new evidence. See Cserép, supra, p. 283 (citing case law from the Swiss Federal Tribunal expressly finding that the tribunal who issued an award later set aside was never functus officio or, even if it was temporarily, will have its powers reactivated). This is a powerful example of the importance of the lex arbitri.
[16] Cserép, supra, p. 287. Understandably, Dr. Hamid Gharavi has already publicly stated that he will not preside over the reopened case. The other arbitrators have not yet stated whether they will participate in the panel for the reopened case.
