One giant leap for Medals Per Capita

It’s just plain heartening when an athlete from an innocuous and irrelevant country refrains from self-pity and quite possibly decides the entire Olympics with one admirable, sacrificial lunge.

That’s why David Neville’s dive to bronze still resonated in the Medals Per Capita offices -- sorry, living room -- even 36 hours after it happened.

Neville hails from the United States, a hopeless Medals Per Capita straggler lurking around in the low 40s, trying to make a name for itself, hoarding medals but forever outpaced daily in the rankings by sudden, superior interlopers who join the list and immediately butt in up ahead, as on Friday with Ireland and Mauritius.

Did Neville dwell in the despondency of his country’s over-reproduction and its ruinous effects on Medals Per Capita? Not a jot. Reaching the end of the grueling 400-meter race on Thursday night, he left his feet, dove across the line toward hard earth, edged Christopher Brown of the Bahamas for the bronze, declined a kindly offer of a stretcher and said, “I did it because it was the only thing I could think of doing.”

Such undeniable Olympic spirit from a peasant MPC country prevented the ultimate MPC bully, the Bahamas, from halving its MPC rating from one medal for every 307,451 to one medal for every 153,725.
Seeing as how that 153,725 would’ve sent the world reeling into discouragement and pretty much clinched the real Olympic proceedings here, you would commit only medium-rare hyperbole if you claimed Neville sort of saved the world there.

After all, with the Bahamas stuck at 307,451, out to run on Friday night came Usain Bolt and three Jamaican countrymen in the men’s 4-x-100-meter relay. Bolt fretted not a whit over IOC President Jacques Rogge’s moronic comments lamenting his excellent celebrations, helped Jamaica to a world record and a gold medal and, most crucially, pared Jamaica’s MPC to a heavenly 280,433, enabling it to leapfrog the Bahamas for a tenuous lead entering the last two breathless days.

Then again, if Rogge weren’t such a suck-up to the “big” countries that lead the outdated, worthless, autocratic “Medals Table,” he might know by now that Bolt, Nesta Carter, Michael Frater and Asafa Powell just bolted to No. 1 in the chic, telltale, fair-minded Medals Per Capita rankings, a feat worthy of enough celebration to make Chad Johnson blush.

Medals Per Capita minutiae after Friday after the jump...

-- It’s past time Medals Per Capita heaped some praise upon Belarus, which brought a population of 9,685,768 to the proceedings and has wrung 16 medals out of it for an MPC rating of 605,360 and a ranking of No. 9. Belarussians have proved especially adept at throwing heavy things, given two medals in the men’s hammer throw, one in the women’s hammer throw, two in the women’s shot put, and one in the men’s shot put, plus the silver from Andrei Krauchanka in the decathlon, an event in which you also must throw some heavy things from time to time.

-- A gasp echoed in Medals Per Capita headquarters when Bruno Julie took a bronze medal in the men’s bantam 54-kg boxing. That’s because Julie hails from Mauritius, the gorgeous island in the southwest Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa. Not only did this secure the first medal in Mauritian history, but it sent MPC officials -- sorry, official -- scurrying to learn the Mauritius population. What if it had fewer people than, say, the Bahamas? Could it rock the entire standings? Well, turned out it’s a fairly substantial and lucky 1,274,189, which lodged Mauritius in a festive 22nd place, just ahead of new Olympic mastodon Great Britain.

-- You’d think Cuba’s whopping five medals on Friday might vault it into the MPC ionosphere, but they actually moved it only from No. 13 to No. 8, partly because Trinidad & Tobago added a second medal to cruise to No. 7, another reminder of how island upbringing, while being pleasant in general, also clearly leads to athletic studliness.

-- Medals Per Capita has a heart for China as China tries to lumber up the standings with that population of 1,330,044,605. Medals Per Capita appreciates that not even the use of a few boneless 9-year-old gymnasts can assuage such mathematical difficulty. To grasp the chore here, imagine you’re an ambitious country and you hold 60th place after Thursday. You whittle your MPC rating after Friday to one medal for every 14,944,321 Chinese, fairly incredible given the 1.33 billion as ever-menacing dividend. You finally slide past Algeria and Chile and lurk within striking distance of Ecuador. And sure enough, here come a whole lot of scrappers including Moldova, Mauritius and Belgium, butting in ahead and knocking you to 66th. It’s rough out there.

The top 10:

1. Jamaica (10) - 280,433
2. Bahamas (1) - 307,451
3. Slovenia (5) - 401,542
4. New Zealand (9) - 463,717
5. Australia (42) - 490,496
6. Armenia (6) - 494,764
7. Trinidad & Tobago (2) - 523,683
8. Cuba (19) - 601,260
9. Belarus (16) - 605,360
10. Estonia (2) - 653,802

Selected Others (from 85 countries with medals):

11. Norway (7) - 663,493
22. Mauritius (1) - 1,274,189
23. Great Britain (44) - 1,385,088
32. France (34) - 1,884,052
34. Ireland (2) - 2,078,059
41. Romania (8) - 2,760,857
42. United States (102) - 2,978,673
49. Moldova (1) - 4,324,450
60. Turkey (8) - 8,986,600
64. Belgium (1) - 10,403,951
66. China (89) - 14,944,321

-- Chuck Culpepper

Culpepper is a contributor to The Times.

Photo: A lunging leap at the wire by U.S. runner David Neville, bottom, gave him a bronze medal in the men's 400-meter Olympic finals on Thursday. Credit: Martin/Presse Sports via US PRESSWIRE

Comments

[MikeM]

Yeah, MPC is 100% invalid. The problem is that countries send teams based on federation rules. Imagine if countries were allowed to send athletes based on meeting some sort of A-Standard, instead of being limited in the ways they currently are.

The US and Japan would send their entire major leagues over to the Olympics.

Italy would send 40 cyclists. As would France, Spain, Germany and, yes, the US.

The US would ship over 6 NBA teams.

And so on.

It's not really the fault of the United States that they can't win the gold, silver and bronze in basketball... The fact is, they could, if only those pesky federation rules weren't so darned restrictive.

That being said, what Jamaica did was pretty impressive. Can't take that away from them.

[NZ MPC FAN]

You can only have one national team Mike. What part of 'Olympics' don't you understand? (Plus you seem to be forgetting the US' bronze-worthy bball showing in 2004)

The MPC is the only true measure. Could we please see a final gold per capita ranking as well?

[tallguy]

Say the rues are restrictive. Well the rules are the rules. and since we all play by the rules, then we shud be judged by the results.

Too bad the rules dont ban diving or sliding or jumping in the 400m or Chris would have won the bronze.

In any event, Chris got redemption and the Bahamas took the 4x400 silver medal.

Which means that now....the Bahamas (for the third straight Olympics) has the MPC crown.
1 per 153,725 persons.

Had Chris won the bronze the Bahamas wud have had 1 per every 100k.
Had Jamaica should be given plenty of props. They hare a country 1/100 the size of the US but has half of its medals in track.

The Caribbean should be proud as well, with a pop of 12 or so million, has only 3 less track and field medals than the US.

[isaac, california usa]

OK, MPC fans, we get it. You're tired of having your accomplishments at the Olympics buried under the mass of medals won by the highly populated countries, so you've invented this Revenge of the Little Guys standard known as MPC. And that's fine, given how difficult it would be for a country like New Zealand or the Bahamas to finish in the top 3 of total medals won like the US, Russia and China regularly do.

So go ahead, New Zealand, enjoy your 5th place in the MPC based on your 9 medals. Since the USA has about 300 million while NZ as 4 millions (a ratio of 75:1) the Americans would need a total of approximately 675 (out about 800 possible) medals to catch you in the standings.

That means we only have 568 medals to go until we catch New Zealand. Praise the Lord and pass the EPO!