Gavin Cooney reports from the 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.

GO FOURTH AND be prepared to have your heart smithereened in front of the world. 

A year after Rhasidat Adeleke finished at the very edge of the podium at the world championships, she did so again at the Olympic Games. 

Again Marileidy Paulino won gold, and again Adeleke finished behind Natalia Kaczmarek, though this time they were split by Bahrain’s Salwa Eid Naser, who has suddenly come back to form having served a two-year ban for whereabouts violation. 

The world, alas, knows where Rhasidat Adeleke is at the moment: she is the fourth-best 400m runner in the world. 

Let’s indulge the luxury afforded to those of us watching from a distance. Rhasidat Adeleke is 21 years of age, and has now finished fourth in back-to-back world finals. She is already in a paradigm of her own in Irish sport, as the nation’s first female sprinter ever to compete in an Olympic final.

And let’s accentuate her age again: she is 21. Twenty-one. She’s younger than the iPod, and the popularisation of the word Saipan. She’s six years younger than Paulino, and five years younger than Naser and Kaczmarek. 

She’s also only been running seriously at 400m for two years, and she has been professional for just more than a year. 

But here’s the cruelest rub of elite sport. Everyone can tonight comfort themselves with these facts except Rhasidat Adeleke. 

The 400m is hell for all those who run it. You have to go out hard and then you have to warn your muscles that their screams are going to fall on deaf ears.

At this level, there are no half-measures, no hedged bets, no wide perspectives. 

You must pour every fibre of your being into this: it’s for this that all those rivulets of sweat were for; all those early nights and earlier mornings; the extra rep on the weights; the acrid taste of vomit. So you have to lay it all on the line and you have to agree that heartbreak can knock just as easily as glory. 

And so after another fourth-placed finish, Rhasidat Adeleke was asked what positives she can take from her Olympic final. 

“No. That’s not possible at the moment.”

The nerves sprouted this morning and wrapped Adeleke in tendrils, but she slashed through them once she got to the track and, in her own words, was no longer “in my own thoughts”. 

Adding to the nerves was her “messy” semi-final, in which she scraped across the rubicon but didn’t have the energy to complete media interviews afterwards. She later revealed her blood sugar was low and was suffering dizzy spells. 

The pageantry of the final means lingering longer on the track. Honestly, nobody should be stood on the threshold of their dreams for so long.

First she loped down to the starting blocks from one corner of the track, went through a brief warm-up, and was then beckoned to the opposite corner to disappear-to-reappear in the announcer call. Adeleke was the last to arrive, strolling in her own sweet time. The windmilling arm of the zealous official eventually admitted defeat and allowed her continue her stroll. 

Once she was called, the roars rolled and erupted around the Stade de France: Adeleke was the night’s hometown hero. 

Adeleke’s race plan is to sprint the first 200 metres in 23.something, and then use her long stride to fend off the onslaught in the home straight. Adeleke clocked that first half of the race in 23.29, behind all of Paulino, Eid Naser, and Kaczmarek.

But as Adeleke sprinted around the bend, she bid goodbye to the vestigial challenge of Amber Anning and reeled in another recurring character in our national story, Kaczmarek. Paulino and Eid Naser were gone, sailing onto the podium. 

She caught Kaczmarek at the 300 mark, turning that sliver of a deficit into a lead. That lead was 0.15 seconds and, alas it wasn’t enough. 

But it looked for one agonisingly beautiful and beautifully agonising moment that the lead would be enough; that Rhasidat Adeleke was already avenging the Kaczmarek-induced heartbreak of Budapest and Rome. 

But no.

Kaczmarek kept cruising and Rhasidat slipped away, holding that customarily painful gait, arms now cutting wider parabolas through the air. Adeleke clung on to fend Anning off to keep fourth place. 

Only seventh-placed Sada Williams ran the final 50 metres slower than Adeleke’s 7.26 seconds. The three medal winners all ran the endgame in less than seven seconds. 

That Adeleke struggles in the final 50m of a 400m race should be no surprise, given she grew up rarely sprinting more than 200m. Her coach Edrick Floréal sees her as a world-medalling 400m runner, however, and she is already painfully close. 

It simply needs more work and it needs more time. Her and her coach have spent the last year layering on the boring stuff of professionalism: more stretching, more core work, more weightlifting. That is all with a view to Adeleke remaining more stable when the hurt comes on in the final 50 metres. They are building a dam to keep the flow of lactic acid at bay. 

Paris 2024 showed they are not quite there yet. But they will be soon. 

The brutality of tonight is found in the fact that Adeleke’s being so close to the podium relies on not acknowledging how close she truly is.