The Skater Who Won Olympic Gold by Coming in Last

On February 16, 2002, Steven Bradbury crossed the finish line of the men's 1000m short-track speed skating final in Salt Lake City roughly 15 meters ahead of the pack — because the pack was on the ice. Apolo Anton Ohno, Ahn Hyun-Soo, Li Jiajun, and Mathieu Turcotte had just collided in the final corner. Bradbury, the only skater still upright, coasted across alone for Australia's first-ever Winter Olympic gold.

The plan was to come in last. Bradbury's coach Ann Zhang had told him he didn't have the speed to match the front of the field, so he should cruise at the back and hope for crashes. He'd already won his quarter-final the same way: he finished third behind Ohno and Marc Gagnon, thought he was eliminated, then advanced when Gagnon was disqualified for obstruction. In the semifinal he again skated last, and the three skaters ahead of him went down in a tangle. He won that race by default, too.

The backstory makes the strategy less absurd. In 1994, another skater's blade had cut Bradbury's right thigh, taking 111 stitches and 18 months to heal. In 2000 he broke his neck — vertebrae C4 and C5 — and skated with surgical hardware in his spine. Cruising at the back wasn't sandbagging; it was the only race he could finish. "Doing a Bradbury" entered the Australian National Dictionary in 2016, defined as an unexpected success.