Consider a new peer Alice that joins BitTorrent without possessing any chunks. Without any chunks, she cannot become a top-four uploader for any of the other peers, since she has nothing to upload. How then will Alice get her first chunk?
Recall that in BitTorrent, a peer picks a random peer and optimistically unchokes the peer for a short period of time. Therefore, Alice will eventually be optimistically unchoked by one of her neighbors, during which time she will receive chunks from that neighbor.