Monday evening in Paris, four U.S. men's Olympic gymnasts watched, taut and spring-loaded, as the fifth member of their team, 25-year-old pommel horse specialist Stephen Nedoroscik, tore through an explosively sublime 37-second performance that finished when he landed, perfectly frozen, knees bent, on the soft mats next to his apparatus. Nedoroscik paused for the briefest beat and then smacked his hands together in celebratory confirmation, before turning and scooting into the arms of his teammates and coaches, who all together hugged, smacked hands, screamed and danced. In the hours that followed, they did dozens of media interviews and appearances, emotionally reunited with their families and ended sitting tucked together on a couch talking to Mike Tirico on NBC. It was a night they will all hold close for the rest of their lives, and it was life-affirming to watch. What a thing.

And all because they finished: Third?

Hang on. Hang on. Don't throw anything.

Let's agree on this much to start: There is nothing in sports quite like the Olympic bronze medal, an honor that rewards finishing in third place with nearly all the ceremonial flourishes that accompany finishing first, excepting the national anthem and the highest step on the victory rostrum. Writ large, these are not small differences -- but the Olympic Games are not in practice writ large; they are a sprawling series of small moments, and in many of these small moments, the bronze medal celebration is scarcely distinguishable from the gold in formality or emotion. (Silver medals are a little more tricky: U.S. sports culture holds a respectful place for NFL teams that reach the Super Bowl or baseball teams that reach the World Series. It's a subtle difference, but it's real. There is no correct position on this). 

Bronze medals are distinctly counterintuitive in a culture — especially American culture — that embraces winning with religious zeal. Vince Lombardi wasn't the first football coach to say "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing," (That was UCLA coach Red Sanders), but it was that sentiment's attachment to Lombardi that gave it an enduring, primal power and a place on locker room walls across the country. Many years later, a Nike advertising campaign connected to the 1996 Olympics used the dark (and incorrect) phrase, "You don't win silver, you lose gold." This was almost certainly not the first time these words where used, but it was the loudest, and also has endured. It is the cruelest -- and often truest -- interpretation of competition as ultimately binary. Win. Or don't win. Lose. At the crass edges of society, some citizens decry "participation trophies," and surely some of them would put bronze medals in the same category, if only for the sake of confrontation.

What took place Monday night in the men's Olympic team gymnastics competition runs all of this through a woodchipper. The U.S. men's gymnastics team hadn't won an Olympic team medal in 16 years, all the way to back to Beijing in 2008. In the years since (and in many ways, before, but powerfully since), the men's team had drifted into a sort of invisibility, while the U.S. women deservedly became athletic and cultural superstars. At home, college men's gymnastics, which produced all five of the U.S team members, is endangered to the point near irrelevance -- fewer than 15 D-1 colleges sponsor programs. Up this hill, the U.S. men persevered. "My goal even here was to make a statement that the U.S. is getting stronger and stronger and we’re only (going up),” Richard said. “And I think we did that today. I think a lot of young boys watching are inspired by us.” Maybe.

Whether Nedoroscik, Asher Hong, Paul Juda, Brody Malone and Frederick Richard are the beginning of an era or a slowing of the end is unknown. Los Angeles is enticing. That the five of them are Olympic medalists is a certainty, because the Olympics awards three medals, a reality so embedded that we rarely think about it. It just is.

The origin story of three medals is uncomplicated (and probably incomplete). In the first two modern Olympics, 1896 and 1900, "awards" — not medals — were given to the first two finishers in a lineup of events that barely resembles the current events. The practice of awarding three medals — gold, silver, bronze — was begun at the 1904 Games in St. Louis, for nebulous reasons that seem attached to both the broad Olympic concept of embracing participation and the customs of the time, wherein fairs and sports festivals awarded ribbons to places beyond first. It stuck, and has outlasted many of the early Olympic ideals, not least amateurism and detachment from international politics, each of which is long gone.

But say this: Whomever it was on the St. Louis organizing committee that pitched the three-medal concept was onto something. It's a construct that has been adopted by other international and college sports: In alpine skiing's World Cup, for instance, each of the more than three dozen races each winter celebrates not just the winner, but the second- and third-place finishers, even though no medals are given. Hence, athletes' legacies include not just their victories, but also their "podiums." (And with this comes the uncertain verb: Podiumed). At the Olympic level, the availability of three medals has across time created multiple levels of opportunity and storytelling. But it's complicated: The bronze medal in particular can be the victory-by-another-name like the one achieved the by the U.S. men's gymnasts, but it can also be a measure of an athlete's relief in a competition that demands near perfection on a specific day at a specific time, once every four years. It's as if someone understood that the ask is too much to reward just once.

These Games are just four days old, but bronze medals have already played mightily into the Olympic narrative. On the second night of the swimming competition, 23-year-old Carson Foster, who narrowly missed the U.S. Olympic team in 2021, took third in the grueling 400-meter individual medley. His reaction: “I’ve dreamed about it my whole life. Every kid in America who starts swimming wants to go to the Olympics and win a medal, and so few get to do it. To be able to do that and to be an Olympic medalist for the rest of my life, I don’t think it’s going to hit me.” Translation: That is a win in disguise.

On Monday night, 29-year-old Ryan Murphy, double backstroke gold medalist in Rio in 2016, and double medalist (silver in the 200, bronze in the 100) in Tokyo, took another bronze in the 100 back, and layered his response with a veteran's perspective, with relief and appropriate name-checking. "That’s a really talented field. Getting third behind Thomas (Ceccon of Italy) & Jiayu (Xu of China); they are both really talented guys. They’ve been really good in this sport for a long time, they deal well with pressure. So, me being third in the world behind them, I’m really not disappointed in that.” Also a win.

Katie Ledecky's bronze in the 400-meter freestyle last Saturday presented a more complex story. It was the first bronze of Ledecky's career after a combined seven golds and silvers in three previous Games. But also: It was not a surprise, Ledecky's dominance in the 400 free has ebbed: She was beaten by Australia's Ariarne Titmus in Tokyo and in Paris by Titmus and 17-year-old Canadian Summer McIntosh. The one-two-three finish was chalk. There is more for Ledecky, a near-certain gold in the 1,500-meter free and a potential, but less certain, gold in the 800 free. The 400 free? Ledecky put it in perspective: "It was such a good field, there was a chance I could have not gotten a medal." It was a bronze that measured both the unemotional reality of athletic time and the towering depth of what Ledecky has done in passing that time. It was right.

Then came Tuesday evening in Paris. With 90 seconds to play in the women's rugby sevens bronze medal match, Australia scored a try — but missed the conversion kick to take a 12-7 lead over the United States, which was seeking its first Olympic medal in women's rugby. As time expired, Team USA's Alex Sedrick broke free and ran roughly 85 yards for the tying try, then added the conversion for a stunning 14-12 victory. In the aftermath, U.S. players, who had lost to powerhouse New Zealand earlier in day, spilled into each others' arms, weeping in exhaustion and euphoria.

For finishing third? No. For winning a bronze medal.