Go Fourth ... and Disappear

Q: Name the one thing at the Olympics that sucks worse than a French figure skating judge.

A: Fourth place.

Finishing fourth at the Olympics is like getting 100,000 shares of Enron or being the next person in line after the free beer runs out. As Mark Twain would say, it's the difference between lightning and lightning bug.

Win a medal in Salt Lake City, and you're treated like a returning astronaut. The medal gets hung around your neck by, say, the king of Sweden. You toss flowers to salivating women, kick it with Bob Costas on the NBC set and tingle at the Medals Plaza, where 20,000 people roar every time you doff your beret. The rest of your life is just walking past smiling bouncers into the coolest parties and having the words "Olympic medalist" follow your name.

Fourth place? Never heard of you.

No medal, no press conference, no check from your country's Olympic committee, no endorsements, nada, bubkes, zilch. Medalists get the Waldorf Astoria. Fourth place gets a leaky hotel room in Altoona with gymnastic honeymooners next door.

Fourth place is Polish snowboarder Jagna Marczulajtis, who was racing for a bronze in parallel snowboarding last week when she lost an edge halfway down and fell. Weeping, she moaned, "Fourth place is the worst place on earth. You are so close to being there, you can taste it."

Fourth place is U.S. bobsled driver Brian Shimer, who has competed in five Olympics and never won a medal. He lost the bronze in 1998 by .02 of a second. Two-hundredths of a second. You can lose that much time to a stubborn snowflake on the track, a wobbly spike on a shoe, the head wind from a butterfly's burp. "I still think about it today," said Shimer, who finished ninth in the two-man event on Sunday, "but I've learned there's more to life than bobsled."

Yeah? Like what?

Fourth place is Canadian swimmer Marianne Limpert touching the wall a minuscule .12 of a second out of a bronze at the Sydney Games and sobbing, "Fourth place feels like last.... Maybe some press-on nails would've made the difference."

Fourth place is no place. Twentieth place is better. At least 20th place lets you sleep at night. Do you know what .12 of a second does to your REM sleep? Fourth place is back to your parents' bagel shop, maybe finishing your degree at Walla Walla Business School.

Remember, in 1994, when Tonya Harding's husband hired thugs to put a few runs in Nancy Kerrigan's hose? Who can say the madness didn't spring from Kerrigan's having finished third and Harding fourth at the '92 Games? Now the bronze medalist is a skating diva, married to her agent, the mother of a five-year-old son and a multimillionaire. The fourth-place finisher is a failed wrestling manager who was just evicted for not making rent.

Fourth place is cruel. In 1972 Finnish cross-country skier Juha Mieto missed the bronze by .06 of a second. It's lucky he wasn't skiing the biathlon, because Juha might have shot someone -- possibly Juha.

This year the USOC is paying $25,000 to gold medalists, $15,000 to silver and $10,000 to bronze. Fourth place gets a crummy piece of paper that looks like a certificate an eight-year-old would get for playing on an Elks Club soccer team. It reads, "For your participation and sportsmanship at the XIX Olympic Winter Games." Says American freestyle skier Jonny Moseley, who finished fourth last week, "It's like, Congratulations! You completed the Olympics!"

All that fourth place gets you is to a doping control station. The IOC tests the first- through fourth-place finishers. That means, you, Mr. Fourth Place, have to wait an hour while the three heroes get their medals and kisses and slobbering press conferences. Then you get to go inside a little room with that giddy threesome -- all of whom are celebrating the greatest day of their lives, thanks to the fact they finished ahead of you -- and pee. With somebody watching.

Maybe fourth place just needs a good p.r. firm. After all, two of the coolest guys in Olympic history, Dan Jansen and Steve Prefontaine, finished fourth. What fourth place really needs is its own medal -- something symbolic, something that reflects the feeling you get the rest of your life as it hangs around your neck.

Is lead taken?

Issue date: February 25, 2001

Don't miss The Life of Reilly (Total/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, $22.95) -- a best-of compilation of Rick Reilly's columns and features, with a foreword written by Charles Barkley, available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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