Cleaver's Games: March 22

There has been a bit of talk around this town that the abundance of fourth placings New Zealand athletes have been securing is a sign of bad luck. Rubbish.

Bad luck is when you come home to find a tornado has moved your house two streets over.

Bad luck is when you abuse the editor in an email to a co-conspirator but you accidentally send it to the editor instead. A certain media type over here might have even considered it bad luck when he locked himself out of his hotel room one night and had to sleep in the hallway dressed only in his boxer shorts.

Bad luck is not having three people perform better than you on any given day.

There's a word for that and it's not "unlucky" - it's called "fourth".

OK, maybe triathlete Debbie Tanner was unlucky after being pipped for bronze after a nail-biting tussle with fellow New Zealander Andrea Hewitt.

It must be galling for her to see such cheap medals being handed out in sports like basketball, netball and men's team pursuit when she left nothing in the tank and goes home with nada.

* Basking in my new-found wealth following yesterday's collect on Asafa Powell I took my winnings back to the tote and splashed on "racing certainty" Beatrice Faumuina in the discus. Hah.

Fool.

My small child will now have to go without food while I try to recoup my losses at the casino.

Not only that I've no clean socks left.

You can see the downward spiral I'm in. My medal tally is six now after seeing Gordon Macauley guts out a bronze medal in the time trial.

As we were standing in the mixed zone waiting to talk to him, one of the several journos there said whatever we did, not to ask him about his new bike because "he'll chew your ear off talking about it".

First question from that very same journalist: "So Gordy, your new bike went pretty well then?"