On the night of the medal race at the 2012 London Olympics, a resourceful member of Dún Laoghaire Yacht Club block booked a restaurant in Weymouth for a celebration, regardless of the outcome. The odds were good. The sailing events last for days and all week Annalise Murphy had been in a medal position. Supporters from home started arriving, swept up on the tide. T-shirts were printed with “Murphy’s Army” emblazoned on the front.
She was just 22 years old, competing at her first Olympics, unburdened by expectation until expectation was the only natural feeling. Murphy had reached the medal race in the bronze medal spot, and because her results had been so good in the qualifying races, the worst she could do was finish fourth.
In the Olympics, a stopwatch or a points tally will measure the distance between third and fourth, but that is a convenient lie: the distance between them is infinite. In the final leg of the last race Murphy slipped off the podium.
The restaurant in Weymouth was bedecked with tricolours and packed with wellwishers. In so many ways, the week had been a triumph and the party refused to be pooped. One of the locals, witnessing this joyous scene, sidled up to Murphy.
“‘You must have won gold,’” Murphy recalls the man saying. “I was like, ‘No, actually, I finished fourth.’ And he said, ‘God, you’re celebrating a lot for finishing fourth.’”
Murphy lived with fourth for a couple of months before she pulled back the curtain of small talk and platitudes. She sat down with Darragh Sheridan, a sports psychologist in the Institute of Sport, and together they cordoned off the scene of the crash. Then Murphy watched the race, to confront it in some way.
“It was like watching somebody else in the boat,” she says. “It wasn’t me. On the down winds it was like somebody had thrown a beginner in. ‘Go in there and try not to capsize,’ is kind of what it looked like. It looked like I was frozen in the boat.
“I remember sailing out and I just didn’t feel good on the boat but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I decided it would make it a reality if I said to myself, ‘I don’t feel great, what do you think is wrong?’ Then you’d be saying to yourself, ‘Well, this is wrong,’ and you’d be like, ‘I’m definitely going to do badly now.’ So I kind of decided I wouldn’t say anything [to myself].
“I was so fast on the up-wind leg I was actually first by the time we got to the first mark. Then on the downwind section I just froze up. I froze up because I didn’t know what to do. Everyone went by me. I think I was last by the bottom mark. When you’re under pressure you start not doing things that you should do.
“It nearly haunted me. I couldn’t help but think, ‘Is that it? Have I thrown away my only chance [of an Olympic medal]?’”
In the old westerns, the villainous cowboys wore black hats. There was no ambiguity. Nobody was good and bad. Fourth is typecast in that way. Are we missing something? Is it ever good?
At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Eoin Rheinisch finished fourth in the canoe slalom. Four years earlier he had gone to Athens ranked number six in the world, widely touted as a medal contender, and finished nowhere. Twenty competitors make the semi-finals in his discipline and he finished 21st.
In his federation and in Sport Ireland, though, influential people believed in him and in the last year of the Beijing Olympic cycle his funding was greater than any other Irish athlete. Nothing from his experience in Athens was discarded; everything was recycled.
“Things like the noise of the crowd in Athens was something I was unprepared for,” Rheinisch says. “Before Beijing I remember working with Brendan [Hackett, his sports psychologist] and we basically recorded crowd noise with a waterproof MP3 player and I trained with crowd noise blaring in my ears.”
At the Olympics he was determined to be relaxed and overdid it. In his first run he sleepwalked into trouble, “but it didn’t give me the sense of panic that I had four years previous in Athens. I was in that frame of mind where the emotion and panic were out of it”.
In the end, he scraped into the final in 10th place. Scores from the semi-final are carried forward and the last qualifier goes first. Rheinisch flew. With five athletes to go he was still in the gold medal position; by the last athlete he was clinging on to bronze.
“I was standing at the finish line watching it,” Rheinisch says. “There was one moment in particular where I thought he had made a pretty big mistake but he just held on. The heat in Beijing was something else and we used to have wet towels in cooler boxes, with ice. When he crossed the line I put my head into one of the towels, just to hide away.”
It was projected as a good news story. Or at least that, in this case, fourth place had some redeeming nuance. He didn’t have a medal to lose: he had started out in 10th and cut through the field. How could that be bad? Canoe slalom came early in the Olympic schedule and for a few days Rheinisch attracted some spotlight. Nobody said they were sorry for his trouble. His back was slapped.
“It was really mixed. It’s hard to describe. The roller coaster continued when I got home afterwards and I started to feel more disappointed. Out in Beijing I got a huge amount of attention – media, RTÉ – which you’re not used to in a sport like ours. But once the boxing medals started trickling in you were pretty much nobody. You really do drift into the background. In the public’s eyes, it’s all about the medals. The world, and sport, move on very quickly,” Rheinisch says.
“You’re telling yourself you’ve got to be happy with that performance but, yeah, it was up and down, that’s the honest truth. Sometimes you allow yourself to think, ‘Yeah, good result.’ And sometimes you were just sickened it wasn’t a medal.”
[ Ireland predicted to win a record nine Olympic medals in ParisOpens in new window ]
Seán Drea’s experience was different. In the 1970s, he was the first star of Irish rowing, 30 years before any Irish crew won an Olympic medal. When he won silver at the 1974 world championships he was breaking new ground.
Ireland had sent 164 competitors to the previous four Olympic Games and came home with one bronze. That was no barrier to expectation. For the Montreal Games in 1976, Eamonn Coghlan and Drea travelled as medal contenders. They both finished fourth.
Drea arrived in the form of his life and in the semi-final, he broke the world record. He says now that it was out of necessity. There were three spots available in the final and with 500 metres left there were four boats abreast. In Munich, in 1972, he had missed the final by one spot.
“Your first job is to make the final – top six,” Drea says. “There are too many people out there who talk about winning medals and then don’t make the final. To make sure I had to make a move with 500 metres to go. I was not going to be caught out by any hundredths of a second. I had spent four years training for that day.”
In the final, two days later, he couldn’t reproduce that performance. Had he peaked on the wrong day? He didn’t see it like that. “No two days are the same. We’re not machines. We cannot produce to the same level all the time. I rowed so hard that I totally blanked out as I went over the line. I just wasn’t able to take another stroke. I remember thinking to myself, ‘I don’t want to drown here,’ but the arms and legs wouldn’t move,” he says.
“I was in the bronze medal position up to 1,500 metres but the last 500 metres absolutely killed me. Fourth is the worst place and people said would it have been better to have come 10th or 12th. No it wouldn’t. I was going for the gold. Over the previous few years, I had beaten the three that finished in front of me. I gave it my best shot. No regrets whatsoever.”
Drea retired from rowing after the 1977 world championships. Rheinisch continued for one more Olympic cycle; in London he finished 14th. Murphy went to Rio. Halfway through the regatta she was in the gold medal position, just as she had been in London. This time, she finished with silver.
[ Cathal Lombard’s Olympics story sounded too good to be true. In the end, it wasOpens in new window ]
“Going into the medal race you can’t help but feel the pressure and the fear of finishing fourth again,” Murphy says. But I knew how to deal with it differently. Instead of closing up and being afraid to talk to anyone I was very open. I said to my coach, ‘I’m absolutely terrified Rory.’ Literally, once I said it out loud I felt better. You have to see the opportunity – which I hadn’t in London. All I could see was how awful it would be if I finished fourth. In Rio I was like, ‘I have this amazing opportunity here.’
“I still think about London now. Part of me thinks if I had won that medal in London it probably would have given me the confidence to believe I was one of the best in the world. Instead you have to rebuild that entire confidence and self-belief – wondering will you ever be good enough to do it. The lengths I went to for Rio were kind of above and beyond what is reasonable for most people. If I hadn’t finished fourth in London maybe I never would have done that.”
So, what did that say about fourth?
