‘It is hard being in fourth’ in the Olympics. Just ask Jackie Wiles.

CORTINA d’AMPEZZO, Italy – In scantly more than a quarter of a second, our brain begins moving our body before we realize we have to move – a reflex. It is, quite literally, the time it takes to blink. You just blinked. You didn’t realize it. That’s how brief this is, a measure of time short enough to contain the quickest reactions.

That quarter of a second – or 27 hundredths, to be precise – was also the difference between two powerful emotions Sunday at the Tofane Alpine Skiing Center here. It’s the difference between a broad smile that signified pride in an achievement that was part of a lifetime pursuit, and tears that represented the same amount of dedication and effort with no hardware to show for it.

“From the inside,” said the expressive, expansive Italian skier Sofia Goggia, “it’s incredible to achieve the third medal in the third consecutive edition of the Olympic Games in downhill. This is something really uncommon, and I’m really happy with this.”

She clutched her medal from the Milan Cortina Games, staged in her home country. She beamed.

Jacqueline Wiles – Jackie, for short – finished that 27 hundredths of a second behind Goggia. That’s over a downhill course that’s almost 1.6 miles long. That’s a deficit that couldn’t possibly be comprehended by the naked eye. That’s a difference that needs sophisticated electronic equipment to detect.

Yet it might as well be the gulf that spans the Atlantic. Wiles finished all of 0.86 seconds behind Breezy Johnson, her American teammate who won gold. That’s digestible.

Finishing fourth at the Olympics by an almost imperceptible margin? It sits at the pit of the stomach, eating away.

“I’m extremely happy for Breezy,” Wiles said. “It’s incredible. She did an amazing job today.

“But of course, it is hard being in fourth.”

She cried. Who can blame her? In February 2018, in a race in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, she blew out her knee – shredding several ligaments, breaking her fibula . It was two days before she was scheduled to leave for the Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.

Finish fourth on Sunday, at age 33, and that kind of history comes racing up behind you. It’s overwhelming.

“I feel like everything I’ve been through in my career, at my age, I don’t have many chances left,” she said through her tears. “So yeah, it hurts. It’s really hard. But (I’m) trying to look ahead. So I’ll have more racing, and that’s all I can do.”

The Olympics are always about perseverance, about triumph, about the work these athletes put in in absolute obscurity and the performances they’re able to summon when the lights go on. How admirable. How inspiring. What fun.

Far more athletes, though, experience something different. They absorb thudding body blows and roundhouses across the chin. They work only to be able to deliver their best performance. But if their best performance is a human eyeblink away from hardware, that can be crippling.

“There’s a huge difference in third place and fourth place,” James Carter, an American hurdler from Baltimore who was twice an Olympian, said. This was 14 years ago. This is not a new phenomenon. “I always tell people that an Olympic bronze medal will open a lot of doors that fourth won’t.”

He knows. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Carter was 22 and an up-and-comer when he finished fourth in the 400-meter hurdles. Over the next four years, he used that experience to mold himself into one of the best hurdlers in the world, a threat for gold. At the 2004 Athens Games, he led three-quarters of the way to the finish – and then his body kind of shut down. He was passed. He finished – you guessed it – fourth.

“When people say the word ‘devastated,’ ” Carter said in 2012, “I think that’s the word that fits the most.”

Which brings us back to the mountainside . Like Wiles, Goggia is 33. Unlike Wiles, she is a central figure at these Olympics. Seven years ago, she was part of a group of Italians who made an impassioned plea to the International Olympic Committee to bring the Games home. She won downhill gold in 2018, silver four years later. She is so prominent domestically that Italian officials selected her to light the Olympic cauldron Friday night in Cortina. The entire experience has been not just fulfilling. It has been moving.

“I didn’t think it would have touched me so much inside,” Goggia said Saturday, the day after she lit the cauldron. “It was really an emotional and personal moment – and like a bit holy.”

Sunday came the race. By the time Goggia skied 15th and Wiles went down two racers later, so much had played out. Johnson blazed into the lead. Lindsey Vonn – the 41-year-old legend, teammates with Johnson and Wiles and good friends with Goggia – suffered a terrifying crash.

“There was a lot of emotions already,” Wiles said, “before I even ran.”

Which couldn’t possibly prepare her for the emotions after she skied. To see the results when they cross the finish line, skiers have to turn back toward the mountain. At the base sits a giant scoreboard. When Wiles whipped around, it showed Johnson in first, Germany’s Emma Aicher just four hundredths of a second behind her, Goggia in third – and then, the most painful rendering of all:

4 Wiles, USA – 1:36.96, +.86

Being an Olympic medalist can change a person’s life. Missing out on one can linger, too. Wiles has two more races – Tuesday’s team combined, in which she’ll ski a downhill leg and be paired with Paula Moltzan, who will ski a slalom run; and Thursday’s super-G. She knows it is her job to regroup.

In that moment, though, the realization that an eyeblink was the difference between bronze and nothing – well, that hurt.

“I feel like (I’m) just trying to be in the moment,” Wiles said, trying – unsuccessfully – to stifle the tears. “You know, the Olympics, there’s always a lot of emotions, and I’m really grateful that I get to share a lot of this with my family and friends that are here.”

Like almost every Olympian, Jackie Wiles poured her heart into her craft over days and months and years. The Olympics tried to rip it out. But should a quarter of a second determine a person’s worth?

“I’ve been through a lot, seeing all the hard times,” Wiles said. “So regardless of results, I’m really, really grateful that I get to share this with a lot of my loved ones.”

She wiped away those tears, and walked away – toward those loved ones, toward more races.