BEIJING — Fourth place is arguably the toughest place to finish in an Olympic competition.

It puts you out of the medals, but close enough to be frustrated, taunted or tormented — depending on the situation and the individual's outlook — by what might have been.

After one set in their bronze-medal tennis match Saturday night, Mike and Bob Bryan were looking that difficult proposition squarely in the eye.

They were down a set to Arnaud Clement and Michael Llodra of France, a team that has a successful history against the 30-year-old twins from Camarillo, and their game was nowhere near the level it had been in earlier matches at the Olympic Green Tennis Center.

Over the next 80 minutes, everything changed.

The Bryans raised their game. They won the match. And in the process, they discovered that bronze is a very precious medal indeed.

"Coming in, we wanted to the gold," Bob said, "and we probably would have been disappointed if we knew we were going to get third.

"But this feels unbelievable right now."

Agreed Mike: "This is really gratifying to come out with a medal, leave here on a high. Even if it's not the gold, the bronze feels really good. Better than the silver."

That may sound odd, but in tennis — as in some of the team sports, as opposed to races in things like track or swimming — it may well be true. You win the bronze. You receive the silver after a loss.

"We won this medal," said Bob. "We earned it. I think we'll be smiling on the podium. The silver medalist will just have a half smile or something."

This gets to why fourth place would have been particularly bitter for the Bryans, and no doubt tastes that way for Clement and Llodra. It means you finished the tournament with two losses — one in the semifinals and one in the bronze-medal match. In the world of professional tennis, that's a wholly foreign concept. Heck, just playing again the day after a loss is strange enough.

"In tennis, when you lose you're on the next flight," said Bob. "You have a couple of days to turn it around. Usually the next day, you're kind of not talking too much, and you're really disappointed. I thought we bounced back great."

No doubt that was part of the reason the Bryans, who had been so sharp in their third-round and quarterfinal matches, and only slightly less so in their semifinal loss to Roger Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka, were a significant step below that level as the match began. They can be pretty fiery competitors, and usually, they have (and need) time to get over a loss.

This time, they were back on the court a little more than 18 hours after their Friday night loss. Or perhaps it was 18 long hours, because they were awake and thinking for almost all of them.

"We were heartbroken last night," said Mike. "Didn't get a lot of sleep, still thinking about what we could have done different to get in the gold-medal match."

In a separate conversation, Bob had similar thoughts.

"We both came out edgy," he said. "It's tough to rebound after a really disappointing loss."

It helped, as Mike noted, that Clement and Llodra were coming off a heartbreaker of their own, a three-set match that basically dragged through five sets, thanks to a 19-17 loss in the final, no-tiebreaker third set.

But it was the French team that gained the early advantage, getting a break in the eighth game of the first set to set up their 6-3 win. And when Clement and Llodra had double break point in the first game of the second set, it looked like it might be a short night that would be remembered, painfully, for a long time.

Instead, they saved both those break points, as well as three others in the second set, and finished their second Olympic tournament on the medal stand.

"We didn't get the ultimate goal like we wanted to," said Bob, "but we're going to fly home happy, and we're going to put that bronze right in the front of our trophy case and be proud of it."

Said Mike: "It's going to go right up next to our Grand Slam trophies. We wanted to win the gold, but to leave with something to add to the U.S. medal count, it's really something."

There are those who think the Olympics are only about gold medals. Most of the world arranges its medals tables according to golds won, not total medals.

That misses the point, and today, Bob and Mike Bryan fully understand that.

It's OK to feel disappointment at not winning the gold. That's the dream of every Olympian, and a whole lot of people who don't make it to the games.

But on the biggest sporting stage, don't slight a bronze. In any sport, you earn it, and in a format like the tennis tournament, you win it.

It's not a consolation prize. It's a reward. And Saturday, it was one the Bryans earned, and appreciated.

— Contact Star columnist David Lassen at dlassen@VenturaCountyStar.com.