Sam Bair: Delaying Inevitable?

Once again, Sam Bair: agonizingly close to breaking 4:00 for the mile. Among his attempts are now a 4:00.16, 4:00.14, 4:00.99, and 4:00.87. But don't despair, Sammy. You're hardly the first person to come achingly close to something. Let's take a look at some other great near misses in history...

Paul Tergat - Sydney 10.000m, 2000. Missed gold by 9 one-hundredths of the second. Looking at it another way, that's .09. Honestly... he couldn't have run even just one stride a little faster?




Steve Prefontaine - Munich 5.000m, 1972. Missed medaling by just .64 seconds. To think... so close to running immortality. Instead, he will be swept aside by history as merely an also-ran.




Dave Moorcroft & Great Britain - Oslo 5.000m, 1953. Clocked 13:00.41, which would stand as his PB and National Record. Think about it: By coming up less than a half-second shy of breaking 13-minutes, Moorcroft disappointed not only himself, but an entire nation, which has, to date, failed to produce anyone capable of running under 13. By comparison, you only let down your Dad.

Boston Red Sox - World Series, 1986. Nice try, Red Sox.









Jonah Freudiger - Nicole Farnsworth's Party, 1991. In an impromptu game of Spin-the-Bottle, the bottle stops just 2 inches short -- 1.2 degrees, by Jonah's rough calculations -- of delivering Jonah's first kiss unto him. To date, Jonah has failed to, well... has failed to date.






So cheer up, Sam. Jonah may never have gotten that first kiss, but the Red Sox eventually won another World Series, Tergat got a world record, and Pre came back to the Olympics in 1976 to rectify the....

...shit.