What it feels like to win an Olympic medal after being a runner up

The fourth best doctor in the world, were it possible to determine such a ranking, would surely feel pretty good about herself.

The fourth best swimmer, sprinter or race walker, on the other hand, is left to wonder, ruefully one would think, what it feels like to hold an Olympic or world championship medal in his hands.

Evan Dunfee was just such a man at Rio 2016, when a collision with a Japanese competitor knocked Dunfee off stride and off the Olympic podium in the final kilometre of a gruelling 50km race walk; and a similar fate befell him in 2023 at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, when the Richmond, B.C. native finished fourth in the 20km walk, 16 seconds off the podium, and fourth in the 35km event five days later, again 16 seconds away from bronze.

As bookends go, those are cruel and unusual happenings. Thankfully for Dunfee, in between he managed to elevate himself from fourth place to win a bronze medal at the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha and again at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were held in 2021 and in the case of the race walk events, in Sapporo.

So Dunfee knows, intimately and repeatedly, what it feels like to finish fourth, and what it also feels like to win his first Olympic medal. In an interview with Postmedia, the personable 33-year-old cast his razor-sharp memory back to events that changed him as a competitor and person, starting with the back-to-back fourth-place finishes last summer in Budapest.

“The 20K was an event I didn’t really care about after Tokyo. I thought I’d stick around until Paris, but probably won’t be fighting for medals. I’ll just have my swan song and go off into the distance and figure out what comes next.

“Then in 2022, I win gold at the Commonwealth Games in the 10K and start thinking, maybe other people are right when they tell me I can be fast, that I can still do well over the shorter distance. So 2023 was about embracing that, trying to figure out the 20K, trying to crack it.

“The race was extremely fast, faster than I had ever gone in a 20K before. En route I broke the Canadian 5K and 10K road records in that race. So it was just a war of attrition, guys dropping off and all of a sudden I’m still here with 5K to go. I have a chance to get a medal in this thing. Unfortunately with a couple K to go, my training partner Perseus Karlssön of Sweden, him and I were together at 16K in third and fourth place, got away from me and I couldn’t catch (Brazil’s Caio Bonfim) for third.

“I crossed the finish line and the emotions were overwhelmingly positive. I had just finished fourth, but that wasn’t even a thought in my head. I had smashed the Canadian record, I had smashed my personal best I set over nine years earlier. So it became the longest ever gap between personal bests at that level in my event. And finally after beating my head against the wall for all these years, thinking I couldn’t be a good 20K walker, I proved to myself that I could be a good 20K walker. And on top of that, one of my best friends had just finished second, so I was pretty elated to celebrate with him. So it was this really joyous experience. Yeah, I missed the podium here, but the confidence I took from that race and the motivation and energy it gave me towards Paris, was all overwhelmingly positive.”

He used the next couple of days to rest, recover and refocus. His fourth-place finish in the 20km race secured Sport Canada funding for the next year, which was a relief. He went into the 35km race focused on the podium and put up a good fight, but a devastating injury ruined his day.

“With about 2.5K to go, I tore my hamstring and didn’t think I was going to finish the race. Spent the next 500 metres in pretty agonizing pain. Basically my thought was, ‘I’m far enough ahead of eighth, if I can just limp around the course in this last 2K, I can still get the $4,000 for finishing eighth.’ Sadly, that makes a big difference in my life. That was my thought process. And luckily, adrenalin kind of kicked in and the pain went away for that moment, I was able to regroup and hold onto fourth place.

“When I came across the finish line I kind of threw my hands up in the air, like, come on, again? Just complete dejection. A complete reversal of how I felt four days earlier when it was jubilant and exciting. Now it was, again? Really? And injured myself to boot. So that one was really tough.

“My event has the annoying bit as well that I left both of those races feeling I lost those races to people who had bad technique and should have been disqualified. That is always a bitter pill to swallow when you think you lose to guys who got past the judges on that day.”

He spent the final two laps of that race, about eight minutes of walking, digesting the knowledge that he couldn’t make it onto the podium. A swimmer or a sprinter often won’t know his fate until the results flash onto the scoreboard. Dunfee prefers the drawn out process.

“The gut punch of finishing fourth is spread out over a lot longer period most of the time in an endurance race, or some of the time, and it makes it more digestible, I guess.”

He also said crossing the line in fourth place presents an immediate dilemma to friends, family and fellow competitors.

“You do have some people who still kind of feel pity for you I guess, or don’t really know how to navigate it. I think after I made it clear how I felt about my race, people were like ‘yay.’”

There was legitimate reason to celebrate at Doha in 2019, when he won his first world championship medal, a bronze in the 50km event. But at 45km, he found himself in fourth place. Again.

“It all comes down to where your mindset is at, what your goals are going in. In Doha, the goal was never to win a medal, the goal was to finish top eight. My confidence had been a little rattled since Rio, and world champs in 2017 and world race walking champs in 2018 hadn’t gone well. So once I had moved into the top eight, everything else felt like a bonus. So it was a very playful attitude. There was no thought of ‘oh no, I’m in fourth again.’ It was ‘OK, yeah, I’m in fourth, let’s see if I can get the guy in third or second.’ I closed that last kilometre in Doha weather in 4:12. I was moving 30, 40, 50 seconds quicker than the guys around me. It was me against the finish line. Will I run out of space? That was the only concern. And I did. I ran out of space to catch (Portugal’s João Vieira) in second. Humbling when you lose to a guy who was 42 at the time.”

Dunfee had his bronze medal to console him, but was only three seconds behind Vieira for silver. Ouch.

“Fast forward to Tokyo, different story. I’m in really good shape. I know the speed is there. It’s a medal or nothing. That was the only goal for Tokyo.”

He struggled to stay in the lead pack early and couldn’t go with Poland’s Dawid Tomala who broke away at 25km and put a minute between himself and his pursuers.

“I remember feeling like crap. I’ve got to sit in the pack and potentially admit the gold medal is gone. That was tough. Then very quickly it became a struggle to stay in the pack. I want to say I was bouncing from sixth to 12th and I kept asking my body for one more gear.

“At 48K I came through in fifth and was right behind Vieira, the guy who beat me to silver in Doha. He was like five seconds ahead of me. I remember not thinking of being in fifth, not thinking about the medals being up the road. I remember thinking ‘I can’t let Vieira beat me by three seconds again. That’s the goal right now, get ahead of Vieira.’ At 49K I got ahead of him and the next thought was, ‘Oh crap, I’m in fourth again.’

“But instead of being neck-and-neck with the athlete in third, like I was in Doha and in Rio, the athlete in third was 22 seconds ahead of me and from 48K to 49K was going quicker than I was. Completely different set of parameters. And I don’t think I processed any of that. The thing I remember thinking of the most is, ‘you can’t finish fourth again.’ Which is the opposite of anything a sport psychologist will ever tell you. A sport psych will always say you need to frame things positively; the ‘I can’ statements. I can finish third. I can catch that guy.

“That was completely thrown out the window. It was ‘come on, you can’t, you’re not finishing fourth.’ After three hours and 45 minutes under the beating sun in the Olympic Games, there was this self-deprecating feeling that you can’t do this again. And then asking my body what I had been asking for the last 20K, for one more gear. Can I ramp up the pace?

“And this time, for whatever reason, I came by the last drinks table, poured water over myself one last time, almost tripped over an errant neck scarf that had been dropped, but for whatever reason my body said ‘go’ and gave me that next gear.

“I just remember being fixated on the athlete from Spain (Marc Tur) ahead of me, getting bigger and bigger in my vision, with about 500 metres to go. I saw how tired he looked and remember thinking, ‘I’ve got him.’ I saw him out of the corner of my eye with 100 meters to go, I could see he was barely staying on his feet. I went by him. I think I looked over my shoulder one last time, and knew I had done enough.

“I spent three hours and 49 minutes of that race thinking I wasn’t going to win a medal, then I got a minute when I thought I might win a medal, and 15 seconds where I knew I’d won a medal. So that was incredibly cool.”

He crossed the line and let out a scream.

“Just raw emotion, letting everything out. It was something I had dreamt of since I was nine years old. So to bottle that up into a moment, it was so special. You wonder what it’s going to be like when you stand on the podium. The thought I had when I got the medal around my neck had nothing to do with all the hard work I put in, or the kids that picked on me growing up. The thought that permeated most strongly is I’m going to get to put this in so many kids’ hands. I’m going to get to use this medal as a prop, as a thing that I can show and kids can feel and I can say, when I was nine and sitting on the gym floor, this is what I dreamt of doing. And here, it’s real, you can feel it. So if I can do this, nothing is stopping you from achieving your dream.”

Five years earlier at Rio 2016, Dunfee’s dream was hijacked in dramatic fashion. Through 35km of 50 he was the race leader, but three athletes suddenly flew by him and with five kilometres remaining he was in fourth spot, with Japan’s Hirooki Arai holding down the final podium spot.

“I had finished 10th in the 20K a week earlier. That had been my best ever result. I didn’t feel I needed another result to have a successful Olympics. So I just wanted to see what I was capable of. So at 45K I convinced myself of that. What are you doing feeling sorry for yourself in fourth? Go see if you can catch that guy. That’s when I had that moment of looking down at my legs and saying, ‘OK legs, just take one more step.’ I did. OK, sweet. This is a good strategy. Just take one more step. And one more step. I kept plugging away and at 49K had finally caught up to Hirooki.

“We’re 1K from the finish line and we’re battling it out for the bronze medal. I go to pass him, and we were probably too close to each other, given that we were three hours and 40 minutes into the race and again in 30-plus degrees. We were both dying and neither of us was walking a straight line. I passed him. He went to pass me back. We got a little bit tangled up. As soon as we got tangled up, my brain went from ‘just take one more step’ to ‘oh, hey, what’s happening around me?’ As soon as my awareness went from internal to external, my legs went ‘no more steps’ and my knees buckled.”

He collapsed across finish line in fourth place, eventually congratulated Hirooki on his bronze medal finish, and revelled in the knowledge that he had broken a Canadian record. Dunfee was pretty happy, and blithely unaware that the Canadian Olympic Committee was already seeking to have Arai disqualified and Dunfee elevated to bronze because of the collision. He went to doping control, where Arai apologized, and where both athletes subsequently found out about the COC appeal. He emerged from doping control and was walking across the course to meet with family and friends who had been waiting for an hour, when the scoreboard flashed an updated result, with him in third place.

“I was literally 15 seconds from seeing family, and I thought ‘I don’t want to go over there and be disappointed and ruin the celebration.’ But I didn’t know what was going on.”

Oh crap, I’m in fourth again

The awkwardness was compounded by the cancellation of the traditional flower ceremony, because the third place result was not yet official.

“It was such a weird couple of hours. I was fourth, and I was fine with fourth. I’d had a really good race and I was happy with my performance. My goal was to leave everything I had on that racecourse and I had done that and felt satisfied. And then it was, ‘no, actually you’re third, we think, maybe.’ And I don’t know how I feel about that. I don’t know if I earned that. And then we were driving back to the (athletes’) village and were told Hirooki’s appeal had been successful and I was back in fourth. That’s when I went and saw the video. This is the thing that we think might be worthy of disqualification? No, that’s not happening.”

The COC could have appealed again to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but Dunfee wanted no part of that. In his mind, it was not an incident worthy of disqualification. He was fair enough to admit it, and tough enough mentally to deal with it.

“I think the strongest point worth making is the athlete I was in 2012 and earlier, this all would have devastated that athlete. I was someone who viewed success in black and white terms of winning medals or not winning medals. So this whole saga of being fourth and third, I would have struggled with that. I had to learn new ways of defining success as how hard I push in the pursuit of my goals, not the eventual outcomes. That allowed me to be OK with what happened.

“I still want to win medals and break records, but as long as I do everything I can to work toward that goal, then I can always find success in that journey, rather than it being hinged on the outcome. I think that mentality has allowed me to pinball between being on the podium and off the podium as frequently as I have and not allow it to define my career, and not let it negatively affect how I perceive my career.”