The Philippines’ Bianca Isabel Pagdanganan putts during round 4 of the womenís golf individual stroke play of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at Le Golf National in Guyancourt, south-west of Paris, on August 10, 2024. (Photo by Pierre-Philippe MARCOU / AFP) It is, perhaps by far, the cruelest finish in all of sports. It doesn’t matter by how slim you missed out on the podium—a microfraction of a second, a millimeter, a stroke.
History books have a habit of scrubbing off the greatness of those who end up fourth. You could see it in the way Bianca Pagdanganan needed to compose herself before trying to put in words the heroic actions that were silenced by the position she officially occupied at the end of the women’s golf tournament of the 2024 Paris Olympics. “I really wanted it,” the 26-year-old Pagdanganan told Olympic broadcaster One Sports after taming her tears on late Saturday evening (Manila time) at Le Golf National.
“I wanted our [country’s] name up there.” It is in the nature of golf that its participants, no matter how great, lose more than they win. Pagdanganan knows this.
But when you have a foot on the podium, only to get that step yanked by a birdie putt on the 18th hole, no golfer’s heart can be so calloused as to not feel the pain. “I wanted to be up there [on the podium],” she said. That much was clear.
Pagdanganan was practically out of the running, with bogeys on 10 and 13 dropping her to three-under in a tournament where a chase pack .