It is often said that finishing fourth at the Olympics is a real torture. If finishing last is a painfully embarrassing experience, then fourth place is a painful experience because you are so close and yet so far away, something that can either lead an athlete to future glory or crush him completely.

India has long had a near miss on the biggest sporting stage, dating back to 1956.

Below are examples of Indian athletes who came close but didn’t make it there.

1956, Melbourne

The Indian national football team reached the semi-finals after beating hosts Australia 4-2 in the quarter-finals, with Neville D’Souza becoming the first Asian to score a hat-trick at the Games.

By giving his team the lead, Neville looked to be making an encore in the last four clash against Yugoslavia. But the Yugoslavs came back strongly in the second half to decide the match in their favour.

In the battle for bronze, India lost 0-3 to Bulgaria, ending a few eventful days that the great PK Banerjee often recalled with some understandable pain.

1960, Rome

The legendary Milkha Singh missed out on bronze by the narrowest of margins. The ‘Flying Sikh’, competing in the 400m final and touted as a medal contender, missed out by just 1/10th of a second after slowing down to glance at his rivals, a mistake he would regret for the rest of his life.

This would go down in history as his worst memory after losing his parents following their divorce.

After this loss, Milkha was on the verge of giving up the sport and it took a lot of persuasion for him to get back on the track and win two gold medals at the 1962 Asian Games.

1980, Moscow

Top hockey nations like the Netherlands, Australia and Great Britain boycotted the Moscow Olympics due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This gave the Indian women’s hockey team a great chance to finish on the podium at their first attempt.

But the team had to endure the misery of narrowly missing out on a medal, losing their final match 1-3 to the former Soviet Union, finishing behind Zimbabwe, Czechoslovakia and the home nation.

1984, Los Angeles

The LA Olympics brought back memories of Milkha in Rome, when PT Usha missed out on the bronze in the 400m hurdles by 1/100th of a second, the narrowest ever miss by an Indian athlete in a competition.

Known as the ‘Payyoli Express’, she finished fourth behind Romania’s Christina Cojocaru, but her heroic performance left a lasting impression and she became a household name.

2004, Athens

After a long gap of 20 years, the curse of fourth place continued to haunt the Indian contingent as the celebrated duo of Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi missed out on the podium at the Athens Games.

Paes and Bhupathi, arguably India’s best doubles players in tennis, missed out on the bronze medal after losing a marathon match to Croatia’s Mario Ancic and Ivan Ljubicic 6-7, 6-4, 14-16 to finish fourth.

Earlier, the Indian duo entered the semi-finals as favorites, but lost in straight sets to the German duo Nicholas Kiefer and Rainer Schuttler: 2-6, 3-6.

At the same Games, Kunjarani Devi finished fourth in the women’s 48kg weightlifting event, but she was not really in contention for a medal.

In her final attempt to lift 112.5kg in the clean and jerk category, Kunjarani was disqualified, but she finished with a total effort of 190kg, which left her 10kg behind bronze medallist Aree Wiratthaworn of Thailand.

2012, London

Shooter Joydeep Karmakar experienced the terrible feeling of finishing behind the bronze medal winner in this edition.

Karmakar finished seventh in the qualifying round of the men’s 50-meter rifle swimming and in the final he finished just 1.9 points behind the bronze medal winner.

2016, Rio de Janeiro

Gymnast Dipa Karmakar became the first Indian gymnast to compete at the Games. After reaching the finals of the women’s vault, she finished fourth with a score of 15.066, missing out on the bronze medal by 0.150 points.

She introduced the sport to India and gave the message that you don’t have to be born in the US or Russia to become an excellent gymnast.

At the same Games, Abhinav Bindra’s glittering career seemed to be coming to a fairytale end, but even an archer of his class was not spared the curse of fourth place, narrowly missing out on the bronze medal, eight years after his historic gold medal at the Beijing Games.

2020, Tokyo

More than four decades after the 1980 Moscow Olympics, members of the Indian women’s hockey team endured a similar experience again at the Tokyo Olympics – they missed out on the bronze medal.

The Indian team performed beyond expectations and surprisingly defeated three-time Olympic champions Australia, who qualified for the semi-finals.

In the semi-finals they suffered a 0-1 defeat to Argentina, but still had a shot at bronze. They looked set to win the elusive medal when Rani Rampal and co. took a 3-2 lead against Great Britain.

But Britain scored twice to take a 4-3 lead and secure the medal, leaving the Indian team in tears.

During the same Games, golfer Aditi Ashok also experienced the misery of missing out on a historic podium finish.

The 26-year-old was ranked 200th in the world and matched the world’s best golfers stroke for stroke, but ultimately fell short after coming agonisingly close, finishing fourth.