Finishing fourth in the Olympics is not something any athlete wishes to be reminded about.
No matter how near or far away you were from winning a medal, or how many times you replay things over in your head, the result stays the same. And for most athletes so does the accompanying disappointment .
Still, so much about watching Rhasidat Adeleke finishing fourth in the 400 metres in Paris last Friday night, then again with the Irish women’s relay team just 24 hours later, reminded me of my first Olympic experience in Barcelona in 1992.
It wasn’t just that Adeleke was in a medal-winning position coming into the final straight, then saw the chance slip through her fingers, as it did for me 32 years ago in the final run to the finish of the 3,000m. Adeleke finished .30 of a second off bronze, after one lap. I finished .19 away, after 7½ laps.
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It was also how so many people were saying Adeleke’s chance will come again, that she’s still so young, that it’s her first Olympics, and the experience will stand to her. The same as they were saying about me in Barcelona. And all of which is true, but still doesn’t come with any sort of guarantee.
I remember thinking at the finish line in Barcelona, after leading down the back stretch and being passed by three runners in the last 100m, ‘this is the worst place to finish’.
Worse still, I then had to come off the track and sit in the same room as the three medal winners as we collected our gear, wondering over and over what if I’d ran differently, or maybe a little smarter.
I remember leaving the stadium and deciding to run the six miles or so down from Montjuïc, back through the Ramblas and out along the seafront to the Olympic Village. By the time I got back, all the tears were dried up, and I was already determined to build on that fourth-place finish. If I could be that close, that was the positive. And it could have been worse.
I also decided I wanted to race the three medal winners in front of me as soon as possible. So I raced plenty more times before the season was finished, and did beat all three. In doing so I set five Irish records and finished on the high of winning the Grand Prix final.
That’s one way for Adeleke to deal with her Paris disappointment now, and I do expect her to race a few more times before the Diamond League season is out, even if these are only small consolation prizes.
She already got her first shot at redemption just 24 hours later, with the women’s 4x400m relay. It can’t have been easy to close the door on one race, and then refocus overnight on the relay.
You could see it on her face at the finish, that look of being so close again, and still so far away. She becomes the first Irish athlete to finish fourth twice in the same Olympics. She must wait another four years before the chance comes again in Los Angeles.
A lot can change over that time period, and as Adeleke herself realised in Paris last Friday night, things also could have been worse.
There were similar feelings for me in Sydney, eight years after Barcelona, when winning silver in the 5,000m and narrowly missing the gold. I still had those same thoughts, that it could’ve been better but maybe it could just as easily have been worse.
There’s no doubt there was great expectation on Adeleke too, the chance to end the 24-year wait for an Irish medal on the track, 12 years after Rob Heffernan won athletics’ last bronze in the 50km walk.
There was expectation on the women’s 4x400m relay 24 hours later, and yet they came even closer, finishing just .18 of a second off the Great Britain team who won bronze ahead of them.
That’s the thing in athletics. The winning and losing of medals is decided by the narrowest of margins..
In our modern Olympic era since 1924, Ireland has still only won seven athletics medals, between six different athletes. That’s how rare they are.
Still the whole country was on a wave of emotion already, having collected a record seven medals, including four gold. The viewing numbers on RTÉ reflect just how high the level of interest was when Adeleke and the women’s relay chased that elusive athletics medal.
Just under a million people tuned in on both Friday and Saturday evening and, even without a medal, the hope is all this has ignited a spark in young athletes across the country to be a part of these medal-chasing teams in years to come.
It is also crucial that we can use this momentum to deliver even more training, facilities and coaching structures to support the wave of inspired young athletes throughout the country.
Overall, Irish athletics performed to an acceptable level; one individual finalistplus three semi-finalists, two personal bests and those two fourth-place placings, with an Irish record in the women’s 4x400m relay.
Even the host nation only managed one silver medal in the women’s 100mh event. It just shows how hard it is, and how nothing can ever be taken for granted.
Also in the relay, of the three teams that finished ahead of Ireland in the final, the USA and Great Britain both changed three athletes, while Netherlands were able to switch up two athletes. Ireland just had the one change.
To be consistently competitive in the event, starting at next summer’s World Championships in Tokyo, there is a need for more depth .
Many athletes from around the world will already be turning their focus to LA, especially those that just missed out on the podium in Paris. The long road ahead may seem daunting, and Paris did come around that bit sooner given it was just three years after the delayed Tokyo Olympics.
But the best thing Adeleke can do now is to race again against the athletes who beat her to the medal podium in Paris, even if it provides only small consolation before getting motivated again by the bigger opportunities that lie ahead.
