Go fourth

 

This is the moment that Alessandra Perilli missed a target in the 2012 women's trap final shoot off, condemning her to fourth place, and handing Zuzana Štefečeková of Slovakia and Delphine Réau of France the remaining two medals. To be the fourth best in the world at anything is formidable, but fourth in an Olympic discipline, separated by one lump of clay? Devastating. And for Perilli, and thirty thousand people on a hill in Italy, doubly so: Perilli represents San Marino (although she is Italian born), and an Olympic bronze would have represented probably the single greatest moment in national sporting history in a country for whom having led the England football team for twenty minutes in 1993 (before losing 7-1) is their current zenith. Like Benjamin Boukpeti and others before her, Olympic bronze would have doubtless have transformed her national fame from present to timeless - and for all that Réau and Štefečeková's medals were earned, warranted and life-changing, the same cannot be said for them. But it wasn't to be. Perilli joined Ele Opeloge as a heartbreaking fourth-placer instead. And why? The boundary was set at three: gold, silver, bronze for the first three finishers, as standard from 1904 and applied retrospectively by the IOC. The mystical and rhetorical power of three has persisted from Calvary to De La Soul - it makes for a beautiful podium symmetry and, for 8-person finals, a real distinguishing mark for the elite of the elite. But what if they'd chosen four?

For a start, San Marino and Samoa would have broken their Olympic medal ducks; their best chances may not come again for a while (no doubt Samoa will have their sights on Rugby Sevens from 2016). All of San Marino's team, other than Perilli, was competing on wildcards, and not one of them progressed beyond the opening rounds of their respective competitions. I watched the entirety of Emmanuele Guidi's entire 2012 archery campaign. Seeded last after the qualifying round, Guidi faced first seed and Korean superstar Im Dong-Hyun, who had newly broken the world record, in a first round match. From the moment Im stepped out I found myself sitting in a sea of raving taegeukgi; for Guidi, there hung a lone San Marino flag by a woman and a young child from the Lord's members' balcony (a penny for the MCC's thoughts). He performed well, but Guidi never stand a chance; Im won 6-0. But it wouldn't have been the Olympics without him. Wildcards like Guidi make the Olympics the celebration of humanity and peace that it purports to be. Without the wildcard, there would be no team present from many, if not most, countries of the world, invalidating the Olympics' very purpose. Spotting the tiny teams from previously unheard-of nations (invariably with spectacular costumes and buckets of pride) is one of the joys of the opening ceremony for households across Europe. Nationality restrictions and wildcards may seem arbitrary - and may lengthen the opening ceremony and 100m competitions by several hours - but it is watching the unlikely Guidi that makes the Olympics the Olympics.

So imagine that Perilli is standing on an extended podium in Woolwich to receive her medal. I'm going to assume it's iron; of the elemental metals in US tradition of wedding anniversary gifts, iron ranks just below bronze (let's ignore tin, which interrupts bronze and silver). La Tribuna holds the front page for the ironclad Alessandra's beaming face as she bites her medal, and San Marino is, for the first time in its history, on the medal table.

(NB, in accordance with standard practice when multiple medals are awarded, no 'irons' have been awarded where more than one bronze is given, e.g., for boxing, taekwondo, men's high jump etc)

What can we read into these? Vietnam, as well as relatively large teams Austria, Chile and Nigeria join San Marino as new entrants to the medal table, and 58 of the 85 medal winning countries also add to their totals, enabling many of them to differentiate themselves from other countries in the IOC-preferred gold-first medal table, which otherwise changes little. The total medal table, on the other hand, sees quite a bit of a shake-up, not least in pushing Russia even closer to China and boosting France to 6th at Japan's expense. The Games no longer appears to be a battle for first and third, but a fight for second place.

It's a measure of the United States' strength in depth that they also top the fourth place medal table by some distance. Male American track and field athletes pick up seven alone; Taylor Phinney becomes a double medalist and Michael Phelps adds to his haul, although the US's strength in the pool leaves only four irons for them. Russia, whose medal total was weighted to bronze, pick up another 20 medals, greater than China and far more than their rivals for third place overall, Great Britain. France, Ukraine and Spain's high number of fourth places hint that they were unlucky not to finish higher, whereas Kazakhstan's total lack reaffirms their apparent 'go for gold' only tactic. A lack of fourth places can be either due to winning nothing, or to having already won everything. So if we compare the number of top three places with the number of fourth places, we can gain some insight into comparative success. Assuming that a country 'should' get one fourth place finish for every three in the top three, we can provide one method for assessing which countries over and underperformed in the standard medal table. In the chart below, the diagonal line indicates the fair distribution of fourth places against top three finishes. Countries in blue achieved an iron: other medal ratio within 25% of this line; those in green achieved significantly more fourth places than they did other medals (relatively), and the few countries in silver can be said to have overperformed in converting their top 4 finishes into traditional gold, silver and bronze medals.

Notable among these are the overperformers in silver. Why are Belarus, Brazil, Japan, China and Great Britain more successful in converting strong achievers into medals, and thus miss out on the agonising fourth places? For Great Britain, home advantage must play a part; the athlete who may come in fourth or fifth will doubtless be spurred by a home crowd to third; the athletes further back may not necessarily be able to convert their lowlier finishes into fourth. Nevertheless, several of their fourth places (Dai Greene, Daley and Waterfield, Keri-Anne Payne) were popularly considered missed medal opportunities. Since 2000, China have consistently achieved a very high athlete-medal conversion rate, and their medal hauls are strongly weighted to gold, rather than being evenly distributed as you would expect, and as United States' and Russia's usually are (although the US was notably more gold-heavy in 2012). This strongly suggests a heavy emphasis on single minded, gold-at-all-costs training regimes for a select few elite, leading to a dominance in smaller events with few competitors per country and fewer medals available (table tennis, badminton) rather than the multi-event, multi-athlete per country events. It works though; even without home advantage and with a smaller team, China pushed the United States close in the gold-first table.

Factoring in fourth places also reveals the varying extent of public attitudes to success. Jamaica, whose dominance of sprinting is relatively recent, was delighted with its performance at the Games. Kenya, now an established long distance power, was disappointed, despite Raila Odinga's attempts to point out that in London Kenya outperformed their record at all but one (Beijing) of the last five Games. Above you can see that, when fourth places are included, Jamaica and Kenya have the same number of total medals. You can also see from the chart below, they entered an almost identical number of athletes into track and road events, and both finished with a 50/50 success rate when we consider top 8 finishers. Using this measure, both nations were equally successful. However, only half of Kenya's top 8 finishes were in the top three, compared to two-thirds of Jamaica's. Factor in fourth places, however, and their medal conversion rates are roughly equal. There are other factors at play of course - Jamaica's rising trend, Kenya's apparent decline; Jamaica's simultaneous independence celebrations; Jamaica's victories in their blue riband events (men's 100m, 200m), Kenya's failures in theirs (men's marathon, 10,000m) - but the difference between resounding success and huge disappointment in the respective public consciousnesses appears to be built not on objective overall performance, but on the 'failure' accorded the 4 fourth places achieved by Kenyan women. There can be no doubt that while total medals may be a more objective measure of success, it is golds, not medals, that really affect public perception - another reason why the IOC prefers the gold-first medal table format (handily, the one in which Britain beat Russia). Fourth, it seems, really does count for very little.

This is, of course, entirely hypothetical - the nature of almost all competitions would be entirely changed if the fourth placed finisher also 'won'. How would bronze medals play-offs be fought? But it shows the almost futile nature of the otherwise necessary arbitrary boundaries of competitive success. A medal for fourth would have seen San Marino blow apart the much-loved per capita medal table as topped by Grenada, as well as achieve an astounding 25% event-to-medal conversion rate. Precisely the same exercise could be carried out for top 8, or top 20 finishes. A medal table truly and objectively fair to the competition would be based on awards of varying degrees assigned to all finishers in all events - weighted according to number of competitors - from first to last; as it is, most competing countries are inseparable on the medal table by virtue of not scoring. Thanks to Perilli, Sammarinese competitors as a whole outshone those from, say, Monaco, but you wouldn't know from the medal table. But therein lies the problem - the medal table is a construct for the Olympic fans who favour competition over human celebration, but if that were the sole driver for the Olympic movement, half of the teams wouldn't be there, and the Olympics wouldn't be able to capture the hearts of the millions of Londoners and billions of TV viewers who just expected some sport, and found themselves lost in 2012.