For all the long years when the only runner-up in the national popular vote who had prevailed in the Electoral College was Benjamin Harrison (who beat Grover Cleveland in 1888), Americans could shrug.
The overall winner – the "editors' editor of the year" – for example, was Cosmo's Louise Court, but she oddly achieved this despite being only runner-up in the women's glossy editor category, losing to a NatMags colleague, Company's Victoria White.
They are the only runners-up in more than 30 years to meet in a subsequent World Series.
Don Poli could line up alongside Mullins' Djakadam, still only six but runner-up behind Coneygree this time, plus the breathtaking Vautour who put in the performance of the season in the JLT Chase.
There were a lot of other cool things that landed in 2010, including Google Maps for Android (Best Mobile Application), Google's self-driving cars (Best Technology Achievement), and the iPad (Best New Device), which we used to play Angry Birds (somehow only the runner up for Best Time Sink Application).
Internationally, the sector is runner up only to the US in terms of the number of international students it attracts to its colleges, and it is the second largest producer of international collaborative research in the world, but we cannot take this position for granted.
My final score of 282 is still the record for the lowest score posted by an amateur in the U.S. Open, but it earned me only a runner-up finish because Arnold Palmer, who later became a good friend and rival, won the championship with a score of 280.
His only serious runner-up, Baldassare Galuppi, is now almost entirely forgotten - though his name lives on in Browning's hauntingly beautiful poem.
That is a question for more cunning linguists than I. OK, then – why is it only a runner-up?
The World Cup champion Hermann Maier crashed and his compatriot Michaela Dorfmeister was only a runner-up yesterday in Bormio, Italy.
Still, another new Sixth, by Benjamin Zander and the Philharmonia Orchestra (Telarc 60586; two CD's and a bonus disc), qualifies only as runner-up.
