Notes were scrawled across palms. Marked-up answer sheets were filled with suspicious adjustments. Exams were mysteriously missing pages.

It might sound like a middle-school math test gone wrong, but it’s a fresh scandal in the Olympics world, implicating as many as 60 experts involved in, of all things, rhythmic gymnastics. The suspected cheats included the test takers who were looking to qualify as official judges as well as their exam proctors.

Rhythmic gymnastics is a much-maligned competition that every four years tends to elicit the same reaction from American viewers — That’s a sport? — as they watch pint-size women swirl acrobatically with hoops and ribbons. With its sparkles and hair scrunchies, rhythmic, as it is called by its followers, can look more like modern dance-meets-small-town circus than a traditional Olympic competition.

The suspected cheating occurred late last year in testing rooms across Europe, where test takers looked to qualify for elite competition like the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. The International Gymnastics Federation, known as F.I.G., spent months investigating the episode. Much of their findings, spanning hundreds of pages, were obtained by The New York Times.