Should Paul Hamm give back his gold medal, as the IOC and the governing body for his sport seem to want? That's a no-brainer: of course he should. The officials miscalculated the score of one of his opponents, costing that competitor a winning score in the all-around gymnastics title. This situation is similar to a football game where a "fifth down" is awarded, or a basketball game where a team is awarded free throws in spite of not being in the penalty. Giving the gold medal to the "rightful" winner is the sportsmanlike thing to do.

But before we set this precedent, there are some other cases we should look at. First, it would also be good sportsmanship for the '72 Soviet basketball team to give its gold medal back to the U.S. I would like to the see the IOC award a gold medal from that Olympics to Bob Seagren, who got screwed out of a win in the pole vault that Olympics because he was prevented from using a legal pole, on the shaky ground that it wasn't available to his Warsaw Pact rivals. Maybe we should make some provision for Rick Demont, an American swimmer who was stripped of his gold medal that year because the medication he used to prevent asthma attacks from killing him wasn't cleared in time.

Then, after we're done with the '72 team, maybe it would be a good idea to give some gold medal props to our women's swim team from 1976, a team that played by the rules, racking up silver and bronze medals, only to find out later that they were being bested by an East German program that used its swimmers as guinea pigs, in medical experiments seemingly created from the mind of Josef Mengele. Shirley Babashoff was probably the best swimmer of her generation, and it would be only fitting for her to be recognized as such by the IOC. And our Olympic boxers over the years have borne bad decisions with the patience of Job; certainly honoring Evander Holyfield and Roy Jones Jr. with Olympic gold at this stage would correct the historic record.

And once we've corrected those historical inequities, then we can talk to Paul Hamm about being a good sport.