Gavin Cooney reports from Stade de France

The 42 Editor’s note: This article by Gavin Cooney forms part of The 42′s subscriber-only coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympics, with unique insights and fresh perspectives on the biggest stories every single day. If you’d enjoy more great sportswriting like this, you can sign up here for a free one-month trial to The 42.

GOD BE WITH the days when we had a bit of perspective around our fourth-place finishes. 

Yes Rhasidat had her heart broken by falling just short of another podium but, hey, she is so young and so luminously talented that it need only be some character building on the longer path to glory. 

But tonight there is no such perspective. There are no positives, no but-in-fairnesses, no taking-this-into-the-futures.

All there is is a deep admiration that has been smothered whole by heartbreak. 

Sophie Becker, Rhasidat Adeleke, Phil Healy, and Sharlene Mawdsley ran the race of their lives on the global stage and at the moment it mattered most and all they got for it was fourth place and a punch in the gut. 

Of course you’d feel they deserved a medal but elite sport follows Clint Eastwood’s creed that deserve ain’t got nuthin’ to do with it. The USA, Netherlands and ultimately Great Britain ran faster than them. 

“If we had come sixth it would have probably been less hard”, choked Mawdsley through tears. 

All tried to repeat the obvious achievements – new national record, fourth in an Olympic final – but this was a quartet who saw an Olympic medal dangling out in front of them before it was snatched away. Adeleke was the most philosophical of the quartet, but she has many more opportunities to win an Olympic medal. The other trio may never come as close again. 

Still, the sheer size of the achievement should be given some air to breathe beneath the blanket of pain. A relay team finishing fourth in the world while representing a country which still prefers to plough millions upon millions more into running greyhounds instead. 

Phil Healy also alighted on a truth in her post-race interview. 

“Look at the media throughout the week”, she said, “It was like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a tough ask to qualify.’” 

It’s true. After Becker and Mawdsley failed to make their individual semi-finals the mood music around the team was that they would struggled to even make the final, and yet they stormed home to take an automatic qualifying spot. 

Becker and Mawdsley yesterday ran with a point to prove, incensed by the notion they should have dropped out of the repechage to conserve energy for the relay. Becker, turbocharged by a healthy volume of sportspeople’s spite, scorched a new PB out of the blocks, and Mawdsley typically held her nerve down the home straight. 

But could they really hit the same heights again tonight? 

The answer to that was an emphatic yes. Becker went out and clocked the exact same time as yesterday: 50.9. She handed the baton to Adeleke, who watched Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone take off – splitting an unfathomable 47.7 – but chased down the rest, with the Jamaican runner hitting the baton off Adeleke’s leg as she came through. It was a stroke of fortune, but it was made possible by Adeleke’s gear change. 

Phil Healy then fought throughout the third leg, running her fastest-ever split just over a year after she withdrew from the relay team amid a personal turmoil that was tipping her close to quitting the sport entirely. Heroic. 

And then came Mawdsley on the anchor leg. The Americans were gone beyond the horizon, and while the Dutch were behind her, Femke Bol was within striking distance. 

And so it was a race between Mawdsley and Britain’s Amber Anning for bronze, but though she pushed and she pushed and she pushed, she just could not claw back those few painful inches to which Anning superbly clung.  Mawdsley clocked a 49.14, her fastest ever relay split. 

Adeleke ran her second-fastest split, Becker matched her fastest, and Healy and Mawdsley ran faster than they ever had before. But it wasn’t enough. 

So the following sentence comes with a health warning. 

Ireland’s national record of 3:19.90 would have been enough for a silver medal in every Olympic final apart from 1988.

It is a measure of awesome progress that Ireland can even find such heartbreak on an Olympic track. 

But for Sophie Becker, Rhasidat Adeleke, Phil Healy, and Sharlene Mawdsley, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting more brutally than anything has stung before. 

Written by Gavin Cooney and originally published on The 42 whose award-winning team produces original content that you won’t find anywhere else: on GAA, League of Ireland, women’s sport and boxing, as well as our game-changing rugby coverage, all with an Irish eye. Subscribe here.