It’s hard to make out, but it’s possible that’s what’s going on — that the ignored child’s name wasn’t read out, which is why she was skipped, because the next child’s name was read out and the official was trying to keep up with the commentary? I think it’s odd rather than anything.
Desperately hurtful for an excited little girl, obviously, but it would be a deeply unlikely way for an official who looks to be in her 20s to be deliberately racist, by ostentatiously and publicly bypassing a black child at a public ceremony being recorded and photographed in front of a live audience, presumably including parents or family of the little girl. That makes no sense.
(It’s equally hard to see how exactly she could have not noticed she’d skipped a child, but, having been at a children’s athletics event last year, and watched people trying to corral the correct winners to connect with the right medals at the right moment so their names coincided with the award of the medals and a photographer, it’s not impossible it was an organisational screw up, I suppose, and she had the wrong medal or something, and didn’t want to give the wrong one to the wrong child? Or we’re all the children getting the same medal?)
The IT article details Gymnastics Ireland taking it seriously, as they should, the official offering to apologise in person for what she said was an oversight, the child’s family not wanting that, a written apology being accepted, a lot more back and forth, and a lengthy mediation process which ended this past summer, and the process concluded apparently to everyone’s satisfaction. Only this going viral now suggests otherwise., obviously.