Yang Tae-Young | |||||||||||||||||||
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Country represented | South Korea | ||||||||||||||||||
Born | July 8, 1980 | ||||||||||||||||||
Discipline | Men's artistic gymnastics | ||||||||||||||||||
Retired | yes | ||||||||||||||||||
Medal record
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Yang Tae-Young (Korean: 양태영, born July 8, 1980, Seoul) is a South Korean 2004 Olympic medalist in artistic gymnastics.
Yang made his World Gymnastics Championships debut in 2001, competing with the eighth-place South Korean team in Ghent. He also participated in the 2003 Worlds in Anaheim, where he helped the Korean squad qualify a full team to the 2004 Olympics with a twelfth-place finish. Yang also competed in the all-around final in Anaheim, placing twelfth. At the 2004 Olympics, Yang contributed to the Korean team's fourth-place finish, placed tenth on high bar, and won a bronze medal in the all-around. He won a bronze medal at the team event in the 2006 Asian Games.
Yang is perhaps best known for being one of the athletes involved in a major judging scandal at the 2004 Olympics. In the all-around, Yang finished third, behind his teammate Kim Dae-Eun and American Paul Hamm.
When Yang performed on the parallel bars, one of his elements was mistaken for a simpler skill. Consequently, his routine only received a Start Value of 9.9. The identical routine had received a 10.0 SV in both the team qualifying and team finals sessions at the Olympics. If it had been valued at a 10.0 during the all-around, and the rest of the meet had proceeded the same way, Yang might have finished in first place.
The Korean Olympic Committee, Yang and his coaches filed a protest about the results, and an investigation was opened. After reviewing the situation, International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) officials acknowledged that the SV for the routine had indeed been incorrectly calculated, and suspended the three judges responsible for the error (Oscar Buitrago Reyes of Colombia, Benjamin Bango of Spain, and the head judge George Beckstead of the United States) but ruled that there was no way to change the results after the meet had concluded.