My Dear Ira,
All set for your second year of studies in Edmonton, I hope. It's 'Summer Time' in Canada in more ways than one, isn't it? The Paris Olympics 2024 are just over, and 17-year-old Summer McIntosh must surely be the toast of the nation and all over the social media feeds of young students like you. What a swimmer!
By herself, Summer won 3 Gold medals and 1 Silver! If she were a country, she alone would be ranked 28th on the medal tally table. For perspective, India, with 1 Silver and 5 Bronze medals, is at 71. Imagine a Canadian teenager setting OlyMedalGoals for a nation of 1.4 billion people!
Canadian 'Summer' - About Winning and Also Coming 4th
But here's another incredible fact about Summer McIntosh - across the 2021 Tokyo Games (yes, she was there at age 14!) and the Paris Games, Summer has finished 4th in 5 Olympic swimming events. So, at just 17, not only does she have 4 major Olympic medals, but she has also missed out on 5! (And with that, I have ended three paragraphs in a row with exclamation marks, potentially upsetting my copy editor. I was informed that they could do nothing but to retain them!)
And that's the beauty of the Olympics, heck, of life even - sometimes, in fact, like Summer, more often than not, we do come 4th. We do have a 'near-miss'; we do lose out on the recognition that an Olympic medal brings; we do miss out on the photo-op that comes with a podium finish. That's life, so wonderfully reflected at the Olympics.
Let's look closer at India's performance at the Paris Olympics. Yes, Ms. McIntosh does make us look like plodders in the world of sports, but things could have been better than just 6 medals. We actually had 9 athletes who came achingly close to winning a medal.
Team India - We Had 9 'Near-Misses'
There was our Mixed Archery team of Dhiraj Bommadevara and Ankita Bhakat, who lost their Bronze medal match to the USA. Poor Lakshya Sen finished 4th too, losing his Men's Singles badminton Bronze medal match to Lee Zii Jia, after actually winning the first game quite easily. In boxing, Nishant Dev and Lovlina Borgohain lost their quarter-final bouts. Remember, in boxing, if you reach the Semis, you are assured of a Bronze medal. But that didn't happen.
In shooting, the discipline in which we fielded some serious world-beating talent, we did win 3 Bronze medals - 2 to Manu Bhaker and 1 to Swapnil Kusale - but we also lost 3 medals. Arjun Babuta (10m Air Rifle), Manu Bhaker (25m Pistol, her favourite event!), and Maheshwari Chauhan with AJS Naruka (Mixed Skeet Team) all came 4th. If Manu had won a third bronze, it would have been staggering because no Indian athlete had ever won 2 medals at the same Olympics before her. But it was not to be.
After winning a memorable Silver medal in Tokyo, Mirabai Chanu was also expected to 'lift' a medal in Paris. But sadly, she too finished 4th in her 49kg weightlifting event, missing out on a Bronze medal by just one frustrating kilo.
And of course, the unkindest cut of all was reserved for the amazing Vinesh Phogat, who missed out on her assured Silver medal by just 100 grams. She had taken out the world number one in her category, Yui Susaki of Japan, who had never lost a match, and beaten two other strong opponents to march into the final. But at the weigh-in the next morning, she was over by the slightest of margins - 100 grams - and was disqualified, sending all of India into a funk.
Imagine if we had won these 9 medals; India's medal tally would have been 15, way more than our highest total at a single Olympics, which was 7 medals at Tokyo in 2021.
But that's the cross an athlete carries when he or she comes 4th.
Legends Come 4th Too - Milkha Singh and PT Usha
And yet, being 4th is no mean feat. Ask Milkha Singh and PT Usha, arguably India's most iconic Olympians until the likes of Abhinav Bindra and now Neeraj Chopra came along with their individual Gold medal-winning achievements. Both Milkha and Usha came 4th, but we still revere them in India.
Milkha Singh, at the 1960 Rome Olympics, was actually one of the favourites to win his 400m race, having beaten the ultimate winner Otis Davis earlier. But on the day, it was an exceptionally fast race, with Davis becoming the first man ever to run a sub-45 second 400m. The first four athletes, including Milkha, who came 4th, broke the Olympic record! His timing of 45.73 in that race stood as a National Record for almost 40 years. So yes, 'The Flying Sikh' as he was known, did come 4th that day. But he also became a legend that day.
PT Usha's story is also worth being retold. In 1984, at the Los Angeles Olympics, Usha beat the USA's Jodi Brown (who came 2nd in the Final) in the Semis of the 400m hurdles and was a serious medal contender. Already a champion sprinter, she had taken up hurdling just a year before the Games. In the race itself, Usha came famously 4th by a margin of just 1/100th of a second, clocking 55.42 seconds against 55.41 by Romanian athlete Cristieana Cojocaru, who took the Bronze.
So, there was no medal, but Usha's performance did cement her iconic status. Before wrapping up her career, the 'Payyoli Express,' so named after her birth village in Kerala, went on to win an amazing 4 Golds and 7 Silvers across multiple Asian Games. In 2022, she became the first woman President of the Indian Olympic Association and was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha. Not bad at all for someone who came 4th, right?
Besides India's 9 'near-misses,' the 2024 Paris Olympics has seen some other unusual '4th place' stories play out, which underline both the pain and the pleasure of being the 'near-miss' 4th finisher.
The 'Pain' of Coming 4th Twice - Rhasidat and Erriyon
For pain, it would be hard to beat Rhasidat Adeleke of Ireland. Of Nigerian descent, but born and brought up in Ireland, Rhasidat faced the agony of not one, but two 4th place finishes in Paris. She finished 4th in the 400m final, and then again in the 4X400m relay. In the relay, Ireland was beaten to the Bronze by just 0.18 seconds, which is close for a race over 1600 meters. She must be feeling lousy right now, but these 'near-misses' will only motivate the 21-year-old to come back stronger in 2028 at the Los Angeles Games.
There's also Erriyon Knighton. Just 20, he has already raced in two 200m Olympic finals, in Tokyo and Paris, and would you believe it - finished 4th both times! Erriyon was just 17 in Tokyo and ran an amazing 19.99 sec race, and came 4th. In Paris, he ran 19.99 yet again. And again, came 4th. To add to the pain, here's a fun fact - had he run 19.99 at the 2016 Rio Olympics, when the event was won by the great Usain Bolt, Erriyon would have won the Silver. That's how it is. But watch out for him as well in LA. At 24, and at the peak of his athletic prowess, he will be a man on a mission, running on home soil. He will break that 4th place 'bogey' in LA for sure.
The Pleasure of 'Redemption' - Jakob Ingebrigtsen
There was one guy who got the '4th Place' monkey on and off his back in Paris itself - middle and long-distance star Jakob Ingebrigtsen of Norway. Hype follows him wherever he goes because he is good. But sadly, in his pet event, the 1500m, Ingebrigtsen didn't live up to the hype, and came 4th. He cut a sorry figure after the race, as American runner Cole Hocker lapped up the attention, winning and setting a new Olympic record.
But then, a few days later, Ingebrigtsen showed up for the 5000m final, and this time, he won! And that's what coming 4th can do for you. It can give you a reality check, which, if you feed off in a positive way, can do wonders. That's what this champion did too - put his head down, revved himself up again, and won.
Coming 4th and Embracing It
Coming 4th also is about understanding that no matter how deserving you are, no matter how compelling the story of your life, you still have to compete and win on the day. And that's the story of Dominic Lobalu. Few people have had a tougher journey - in 2007, just 9 years old, he lost both parents when his village in South Sudan was attacked. He spent the next 10 years in refugee camps in Kenya. But he was lucky his running talent got spotted, and this year in Paris, he was part of the tiny 'Refugee Olympic Team' (which is such a great idea, isn't it?)
Lobalu ran in that same Ingebrigtsen 5000m 'redemption' race, but as fate would have it, he finished 4th. Surely, a medal would have brought much-needed cheer to millions of refugees roughing it out in camps across the world. But it was not to be. He lost out to (yet another) American, Grant Fisher, by just 0.14 seconds, which is like a photo finish in a 5-kilometer race.
And that, Ira, is how it is. Coming 4th is a part of life. But it is to be embraced. It shows we really gave it our best, giving us hope to come back and do better. And the world too, more often than not, does acknowledge and applaud, even when we come in 4th.
So, if you ever come 4th, no worries. It's proof that you rock. It's proof that you turned up. For Mama and me, that's all that matters.
Love,
Papa.
(Rohit Khanna is a journalist, commentator and video storyteller. He has been Managing Editor at The Quint, Executive Producer of Investigations & Special Projects at CNN-IBN, and is a 2-time Ramnath Goenka award winner.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.