RIO DE JANEIRO—They didn’t have a lot in common, really, other than being Canadian. On the last Saturday of the Rio Olympics the walker and the runner, the loser and the winner, both came to the main Olympic park to speak. They were two sides of a coin, if you wanted to look at it that way. First, Evan Dunfee, of Vancouver, who spent Friday fighting for a medal in the 50-kilometre walk. Sometimes in mid-race men just fall over, empty, practically dead. Sometimes they defecate themselves. It might look silly, but it’s a hard man’s race. So after 49 kilometres Dunfee was fighting to keep himself from falling, and he and Japan’s Harooki Arai were trading attacks, and the Japanese runner came brushing past, aggressively. “He was trying to come by me as close as possible so I could feel him come by me, because when you pass them you want to break them,” Dunfee said. “You want to pass them with authority.” They tangled up, and Dunfee threw an elbow in the jostling and his focus snapped. His legs turned to water, and he finished fourth. The Japanese runner was disqualified upon review but won his appeal, and Arai got the bronze medal back. Dunfee could have counter-appealed. Medals count, and are counted. He didn’t. He thought it was a fair move: he figured, even if I won an appeal I couldn’t accept a medal with a clear conscience. Before the appeal he ran into Arai in the anti-doping area, actually; Arai, through a translator, said, “I
from Breaking News http://ift.tt/2bTyTq4
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