Canadian offers rare lesson in grace
RIO DE JANEIRO • Canadian race walker Evan Dunfee appeared to lose a bronze medal, then won it back, then lost it again, all in the space of a few hours of a strange Friday.
And although he had the chance to file an appeal that might have put him back on the podium, the 26- year- old from Richmond, B.C, said his conscience wouldn’t let him do it.
He said he thought, in the end, the right call was made. Even though it denied him a medal.
“I will sleep soundly tonight, and for the rest of my life, knowing I made the right decision,” Dunfee said in a statement late on Friday. “I will never allow myself to be defined by the accolades I receive, rather the integrity I carry through life.”
It was another poignant moment in a Games that, despite the problems they often have, still manage to break hearts and swell chests in equal measure.
Dunfee was in third place with only a kilometre left in the 50- kilometre race walk. He was jostled by oncomi ng walker Hirooki Arai of Japan, and the collision threw Dunfee off his stride — a key element of the race walk. He struggled to the finish, but Athletics Canada appealed to race officials, who ruled that Arai had committed an infraction, and disqualified him. That gave Dunfee the bronze in a Canadian-record time of 3:41.38.
But the Japanese filed a protest and the Jury of Appeals overturned the disqualification, r eturning the bronze medal to Arai and putting Dunfee back in fourth position. Matej Toth of Slovakia won gold at 3:40.58, Australia’s Jared Tallent took silver at 3:41.16.
Dunfee had the option to appeal the appeal to the Court of Arbitration f or Sport ( CAS), but he decided against it.
“Following my return to the village and my viewing of the incident I made the decision not to appeal, as I believe the right decision stood,” Dunfee said in his statement.
“Not many people can understand the pain athletes are in three and a half hours into such a gruelling race. I believe that both the Japanese athlete and myself got tangled up, but what broke me was that I let it put me off mentally and once I lost that focus, my legs went to Jell- O,” he said.
The fateful bump came as Arai attempted to pass Dunfee on the inside. It looked l i ke the Canadian might have initiated the contact with his left arm, but Arai did walk into the collision.
“Contact is part of our event, whether written or unwritten and is quite common, and I don’t believe that this was malicious or done with intent,” Dunfee said, in one of the more thoroughly gracious statements from a losing athlete in recent memory. “Even i f an appeal to CAS were successful I would not have been able to receive that medal with a clear conscience and it isn’t something I would have been proud of.”
Toth, the gold medallist, called the situation after Arai’s disqualification “unbelievable.” He was speaking after the race, before the decision was overturned.
“You know when you walk 50 kilometres, and then after the finish (it all changes),” he said. “I can’t imagine. I know Evan. He is my good friend.”
Dunfee started race walking at age 10 on his driveway. A couple of hours later, after instruction from his older brother Adam, he won his age group at the B.C. track and field championships.
Dunfee honed his craft by clocking more miles on his personal odometer than your average beater in the scrapyard — many of them coming on the Vancouver seawall.
The UBC ki nesiolog y graduate is known internationally for speaking his mind on doping, even when others stayed silent. The New York Times labelled him “t he vigilante race walker” l ast year for his use of the Internet to bring down cheating Russian race walkers.
The digital detective painstakingly monitored social media and found pictures of 2012 Olympic cham- pion Elena Lashmanova racing in Russia, despite a twoyear ban for blood doping.
Fourth place in the Olympics. A new national record. And a lesson in class and sportsmanship.
“I couldn’t be more proud of my efforts out on the course today,” Dunfee said. “I know that I left everything I possibly had out there and I can’t ask for anything more than that.”