How it unfolded
Leading through four rotations, Paul Hamm fell sideways on his vault landing and stumbled toward the judges' table, scoring 9.137 and dropping to 12th place. He scored 9.837 on each of the two remaining apparatus, parallel bars and high bar, and won with a comeback total of 57.823. Kim Dae-eun took silver with 57.811 and Yang Tae-young bronze with 57.774, a margin of only 0.049 between first and third. Immediately after the competition, the Korea Gymnastics Association raised an objection that Yang's parallel bars start value had been miscalculated at 9.9 instead of 10.0. FIG acknowledged the error and suspended three judges from that apparatus, but let the results stand, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport that October rejected Korea's appeal on the procedural grounds that no protest had been lodged during the competition itself. Days later at the same arena, crowd jeers over Alexei Nemov's high bar score halted competition for several minutes and led to an on-the-spot upward revision.
Why it still matters
The decisive event that broke the perfect-10 system. Television exposed the fact that a 0.1-point start-value error could change the owner of an Olympic all-around gold medal, and the 10-point scale lost its legitimacy as a result. FIG introduced a new scoring system from 2006 that separated an unlimited difficulty score from an execution score starting at 10.00. Today's D-score and E-score system is a direct product of this competition.