Olympic Games 2024: Too much focus on medals: Olympic fourth-place finishers are also successful

Tears flowed down Angelina Köhler’s face. “The fourth is always shit,” she said into the ZDF microphone and to all the viewers at home. As world champion in the 100-meter butterfly swimming, she jumped into the pool on the first weekend of the Olympics and emerged fourth without a medal. »It’s super sad. I gave it my all and then it’s fourth place. That’s always the first loser. Just an hour later, her teammate Melvin Imoudu also finished fourth in the 100 meter breaststroke. While the Berliner was almost two tenths of a second away from bronze, the Potsdamer was only eight hundredths away from gold! But there was no trace of bitterness or tears on his part: “I can be very satisfied. I fought to even get to the final. It is what it is,” Imoudu said. How different perspectives can be.

A good two weeks have now passed and the games ended on Sunday with the final competitions and the closing ceremony. It’s the time of balance sheets, and from a sporting perspective, they traditionally move along the medal table. The German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) had set itself the goal of being among the top ten nations and was just able to achieve this in tenth place.

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With a total of 33 medals – twelve gold, 13 silver and eight bronze – the DOSB athletes lagged somewhat behind their result from Tokyo 2021, which they wanted to use as a guide. At that time, 37 plaques were collected. In any case, we are miles away from the balance sheets of the 1990s. So another step down? Even if quite a few critics will now question the entire funding program, upon closer inspection it is not necessarily necessary to speak of a poor German performance.

With the exception of the – as usual strong – hosts France and Australia, most of the other top nations did not come close to their results from Tokyo, even though Russia was no longer a major opponent. The trend of successes being spread across more and more nations around the world, because even smaller countries can give special support to a talented twosome in rowing or have a sprinter trained to become a world leader at a college in the USA, continued in Paris. Comparisons with decades past, in which either widespread doping or simply more money benefited individual nations everywhere, have become meaningless.

The arbitrariness of the number of medals

However, other comparisons do not. Especially those with individual best performances. Many German athletes have demonstrated good form building. The swimmers in particular did a good job this time in terms of width and broke a whole series of personal and even German records, although the pool was only two meters deep and hardly allowed for fast times, which was evident from the rather small number of world records for the Olympics. Of course, there were also athletes who couldn’t match their previous brilliant achievements, such as swimmer Florian Wellbrock, shooter Christian Reitz or climber Alexander Megos. One slipped foot and it was all over very quickly.

This is also the Olympics. Sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t. But the fact that fourth places should represent a defeat is a fundamental misjudgment. It is also completely arbitrary. At the first modern Games in 1896 and 1900, only the first two athletes in each discipline received a medal. So was the third party the first loser back then? In ancient Olympia only the winner was honored.

The modern three-part division into gold, silver and bronze has now spread to all sports competitions, even outside the Olympic Games, but its arbitrariness remains. The DOSB is therefore well advised to continue to count all final placements, i.e. those between one and eight, beyond the medal table. After all, German shooters had already taken fourth place in the very first competition at the Paris Olympic Games, and a few more came after that. Until shortly before the end of the games there were 15. A five flashed in front of the German flag on the result screens 25 times. Double-digit numbers of German athletes were also among the sixth, seventh or eighth best athletes in the world. Are these really supposed to be disappointments?

Or is it instead just a success if the German canoeists Paulina Paszek and Jule Hake won bronze on Friday, but the Hungarians Noemi Pupp and Sara Fojt were initially placed behind them, although there was a difference after a good 80 seconds of racing, even in slow motion with just one eye wasn’t visible? The fact that the Germans immediately consoled their opponents after just a few seconds of cheering was a great gesture that showed that both duos should receive bronze. Luckily that’s how it happened.

So four medals in one competition. Why not? Fourth places also deserve recognition. Even swimmer Angelina Köhler soon saw it that way, despite her disappointment. »It couldn’t have gone better. Even my time from the World Cup title wouldn’t have been enough,” she said and promised: “I will train even harder for Los Angeles 2028. Give it more.” Good for her. But that shouldn’t be necessary at all.

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