There are a lot of counter words in Japanese. The plain ordinal numbers are daiiti (第一) and so on. For third in a race, I think sanban (三番) (the cardinal) would be fine. For the phone, maybe 二度目 would be okay. Hopefully, someone else will help.
Last edited by j_bertoni2279 on July 16th, 2011 10:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.