Paul Lewis: Going fourth wasn't always a disaster

Poor old Trevor Mallard was pinned with a hail of verbal arrows for his comments about the New Zealand Commonwealth Games team and their propensity for coming fourth.

Far be it from me to defend a politician - it feels downright unnatural - but I figure Mallard made the right comment, but maybe for the wrong reasons. He said the New Zealand team came home with too many fourths. Agreed. All you have to do is read the individual results to see that this is perfectly accurate.

But he went on to say that it was down to mental toughness and segued on to some vague comparison about problems playing the Australians in rugby, netball and league and the mental toughness needed to beat them. Some athletes (and some fans) got snaky about this and turned on Trev as if he had advocated New Zealand becoming the next state of Australia.

Most got upset about his "fourth" comments. In riposte, the example was given of Chantal Brunner, the 35-year-old long jumper who came fourth in the long jump at the Melbourne Games - but only 1cm out of a silver medal position.

This was where the argument turned from "too many fourths" to "mental toughness". Brunner's effort can hardly be taken as a lack of mental toughness. Not only did she jump close to a medal, her leap of 6.56m was her best in any Olympic or Commonwealth Games since the 6.62m she jumped in the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, although not as good as her personal best of 6.68m, set in 2001.

No, the plain fact is that some of the fourths were creditable and others weren't. Of those that weren't, the reasons were many and varied and it was a bit expedient of Trev to lump them all under the heading of "mental toughness" - which is why he is probably feeling a bit burned by the blowback.

Take Shelley Kitchen, the squash player who came home with a silver (women's doubles) and a bronze (singles). Her best chance of a medal was reckoned to be in the mixed doubles with Glen Wilson. But they crashed out in the semis to an English pair after winning the first two games at breakneck speed and looking like gold medallists indeed. They then lost the bronze-medal match to an Aussie pair, finishing fourth. On the surface, this wasn't a creditable fourth.

But what undid Shelley Kitchen, in my humble opinion, was not mental toughness. She had the busiest single schedule of any New Zealand athlete in Melbourne, playing singles, doubles and mixed doubles for every day of the Games.

Mixed doubles is also an odd version of squash. Typically, the pairings direct most of the play to the two women. The blokes stand in the middle and make the odd intervention but this is mostly a female-to-female and male-to-female battle. So, in the match against the English, Kitchen blazed away beautifully for two games. But then her tiredness seemed to get to her, the mistakes started coming and she and Wilson tried little tricks but to no avail. They had lost the momentum.

The answer seems obvious: don't give Kitchen so much work to do. If she had been spared even a part of her schedule, we may have had gold in the mixed doubles rather than a fourth. Mental toughness? No - but maybe mental dexterity in providing smarter scheduling.

The in-form Australian Grinham sisters were always going to win the doubles gold and Kitchen was very much the senior partner in her pairing with Tamsyn Leevey. So it could be argued she spent an awful lot of energy getting a silver at the expense of a gold.

Take, too, the example of weightlifter Grant Cavit. He blew a muscle when in good position for a bronze. He tried to lift a big weight carrying the injury but the pain was too great. Watch him trying that weight with a bung thigh and tell me he's not mentally tough.

There are many other examples of fine fourths. Debbie Tanner in the triathlon, Brent Newdick in the decathlon, Paul Hamblyn in the 1500m, to name just a few.

But while Trev got his feathers singed by being too broad in his criticism, his original point remains valid - too many fourths. Thirty-one, to be exact. If half of those fourths had been turned into thirds or better, the team would have hit the Sparc target of 46 medals.

The trick now will be for the member sports from the overall team to work out why their fourths were not turned into bronzes.

Some of it may be a peaking issue. Bowls, for example, swept all before them at Oceania and Tri-Nations before the Games but managed only a bronze in Melbourne. It may also be partly an attitudinal problem. Athletes in some sports try so hard to beat tough qualifying standards that they almost unconsciously relax once selected.

Mental toughness? Maybe - but perhaps our politicians might like to show some themselves.

The cynical amongst us could say that Mallard was poking the athletes with a sharp stick before anyone thought to prod him with one. Better, maybe, to tell us how to beat the mental toughness problem, Trev.

You know, solve the issue as opposed to just raising it...

-HERALD ON SUNDAY