Gymnastics officials expect AI judging at LA28 despite gymnasts' complaints

Nov 13, 2026
The AI system downgraded vaults by Carlos Yulo and Harry Hepworth at the World Championships; skiing and dressage are piloting AI judging too.

Gymnastics officials expect AI-assisted judging to be used at the LA28 Olympics, even after leading gymnasts criticised it at this year's World Championships, BBC Sport reports. Andrew Tombs, president of the men's artistic gymnastics technical committee, said bosses in the sport would be "highly surprised" if it were not.

At the Worlds in Rotterdam, the AI-based Judging Support System downgraded the vaults of Olympic champion Carlos Yulo and Britain's Harry Hepworth from a 5.6 to a 5.2 difficulty, judging that their legs were bent into a tuck rather than a pike. "It's AI, I'm not a robot," Yulo said. The system uses AI and motion analysis to recognise more than 800 elements and gives judges multi-angle video and measurements of body angles. Tombs said judges would have made the same calls without it, but that the point of measurement may be adjusted.

Other judged sports are following. The International Ski Federation will pilot AI judging in aerials and wants all or most of its disciplines ready for AI judging by 2029, and the equestrian federation FEI will trial AI in dressage at World Cups, though it expects human judges to stay.

We hope you enjoyed this article

Consider subscribing to one of our newsletters like Daily AI Brief.

Also, consider following us on social media:

Stefan Hof AI in Sports AI Brief AI Brief (X)
Free newsletter

Daily AI Brief

Daily report covering major AI developments and industry news, with both top stories and complete market updates

Guide
European AI model labs

European AI model labs

Labs based in Europe that train their own AI models

Whitepaper

Tensordyne Napier: What If One Rack Could Do the Work of Nine?

Tensordyne

This Tensordyne whitepaper presents Napier, an inference-focused AI processor and rack-scale system based on the company’s TDN Math logarithmic number system. It examines infrastructure requirements for large mixture-of-experts and agentic models, compares major inference architecture approaches, and details the TDN AIP processor, TDN72 pod, TDN Link fabric, and Napier Ultra configuration. The paper reports simulation-based performance, cost, and accuracy-validation results, including Tensordyne’s projected comparison of one Napier rack with a nine-rack Nvidia Rubin plus Groq deployment; the chip is reported as taped out and in fabrication.

Read more

You may also like

Free, six days a week

Daily AI Brief: the AI news that matters, in your inbox.