Evan Dunfee represents true Olympic sportsmanship

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Over the 16 days of these Olympics, we focus on the medal table and the podium -- how many won, how many gold, and of course that tingly moment when O Canada plays and the Maple Leaf flag is raised.

What we remember, though -- what we cherish -- has nothing to do with gold, silver and bronze: It’s a broken ski pole that a rival coach replaces in the middle of a gruelling cross-country. It’s a 5,000-metre runner suddenly down on the track, then getting a hand to get up and encouragement to keep going from a fellow competitor. It’s a speed skater giving up his spot to a teammate.

On Friday, Evan Dunfee joined the likes of Bjornar Haakensmoen, Nikki Hamblin and Gilmore Junio in the rarest circles of sportsman- and sportswomanship: standing off the podium he was poised to take his wobbly legs up on to, and left in the Olympics’ cruellest spot of fourth place.

“It all depends on your tone,” Dunfee said Saturday, resetting that particular spin. “I could say, I raced 50 kilometres - and came in fourth. I was ranked 11th. I was the only one of the top six to do a personal best.

“I don’t think you can be disappointed.”

Dunfee, a ginger-haired wisp of a man, competes in a sport that’s no jog in the park -- race walking, it’s called, an elbows-out, hip-swinging, head-busting parade of pain that on Friday measured 50 long kilometres, or nearly eight kilometres more than running’s marathon distance, and provides a quadrennial punchline to most sports fans raised on a diet of hockey, baseball, and “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

“Maybe this will help race walking not seem like something that’s weird,” he would say later of the attention surrounding the controversial finish to Friday’s race. When the drama was at its height, Dunfee came across Japan’s Hirooki Arai, just the two of them and an interpreter in the doping-control room. Moments earlier, Arai had hip-checked him, knocking him off stride and out of focus with a kilometre to go, after 3 ½ hours of fast walking. Dunfee never recovered. He knew of Arai’s competitive fire firsthand, having raced against him. But they’d never spoken to each other before.

“He was disqualified at that point, and I was in third, and the first thing he said to me was ‘sorry,’” Dunfee recalled. “It was a big testament to the kind of person he is. I’m thinking, what is this guy sorry for?”

Meantime, Dunfee wasn’t celebrating. It didn’t feel right. And after the finishing order was restored, Dunfee was again fourth -- and telling his team officials to not bother with a final appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Back at the Athletes Village, when his head finally cleared and his legs had gone from Jello to hard cement, it began to hit him what had happened. Chef de mission Kurt Harnett, who’d watched the race live, came to sit him down and have a chat. Adam van Koeverden, whose storied Olympic career came to an end here, offered congratulations.

"I’m like, no, what is he talking about?” Dunfee said. “I want to say congratulations to them.

“To see the sort of guys that I grew up watching and supporting and helping shape what Canadian sport means -- to have them come up say what I did was so awesome and so Canadian was maybe a bit of a passing of the torch, but at the same time just a huge sign of respect, and it means so much to me.”

Where do these moments come from? What is it about this environment that brings them out, in the heat of the most intense competition? Dunfee knew before he came here, raised by his father and mother and coaches on the values of sportsmanship first in baseball, hockey and finally his chosen path in this arcane corner of the Olympics. He’s lived this moment before, training in anonymity on Vancouver’s Stanley Park seawall path. Under these five rings, these moments become iconic.

“Getting to this level takes more than just being physically gifted. It takes a level of hard work, dedication, compassion, and all these things come together to really help shape an individual. The Olympics specifically bring out some of those great characters. Because nobody’s in the race walk for money and glory.

“Anyone who lives their life for the medal, and based on the medal, they’re not going to be happy when they get it. They’ll never be happy.”

Along the seawall in Vancouver, just a hunch he’ll be recognized a little more readily once training starts again for the next Games. But first, a run -- no, he’ll probably walk into the Maracana, joining the rest of the athletes left here for the closing ceremony Sunday night: A happy man, dancing as hard as his tired legs and Olympian spirit will allow.