Conversion of Interval data to ordinal data
In my opinion etc. is playing key role here. Ordinal data must have the fixed length, which is not in this case as we can go on even further as 1st,2nd,3rd,4th,.. and so on. There is no end to this. You can argue that there must be fixed number of runners(say 50) and hence we have only 1-50 rank. But it is not mentioned in question hence this assumption is not valid.

If no of atheletes participating were mentioned then you're right.