Triple jumping over the Medals Per Capita table

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When Medals Per Capita academicians meet in future years, they might just exhale pipe smoke and reminisce about the fur-flying Beijing night of Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008.

Or actually, they might not, but what a breathless Medals Per Capita ruckus.

First came the women’s 200 meters, another bonanza for Jamaica, that fearsome, established, Medals Per Capita T-Rex. With its strategically sound population of just 2,804,332 and its track-and-field prowess, this global MPC powerhouse hogged almost the whole medal podium and lengthened its lead over fellow kingpin Slovenia.

Veronica Campbell-Brown won gold and Kerron Stewart won bronze as Jamaica widened its medal collection to nine and whittled its MPC from one medal for every 400,618 Jamaicans to one for every 311,592.

If you thought this constituted an MPC throw-down to the rest of the beleaguered world, you would be MPC-correct.

Fifty-five minutes later, though, came the unbelievably momentous triple jump.

Now, some might find it unfitting that the entire, entrenched, two-week, fur-flying Medals Per Capita might just boil down to what just happened in the men’s triple jump.

After all, the triple jump would have to be one of the weirdest human pursuits ever concocted, athletes running down a track to hop, skip and jump, indecipherable to the untrained eye and ludicrous in a sense: Most people, if needing to travel that distance, would either just run, walk or, if in Los Angeles, use a car.

In steadfast defense of the triple jump, though, it must be said that the triple jump became the first modern Olympic event ever, back in 1896 when Athens held the first modern games and NBC reportedly did such a lousy job.

That made the American triple-jumper James Connolly from South Boston, Mass. -- his statue is still there -- the first Olympic gold medalist since roughly 385 A.D., or back during the ancient games when NBC reportedly did such a lousy job.

The triple jump then nestled into Olympic habit, seldom making much news until 1996, when honchos finally added triple-jumping for women, finally deeming women capable of triple-jumping to conclude a century of astonishingly mindless triple-jump sexism.

Well, look now, because the triple jump looms large over the world, and because while Portugal’s Nelson Evora won gold over a bummed-out silver medalist Phillips Idowu from that new sporting colossus, Great Britain, MPC students carefully eyeballed the bronze medalist, who triple-jumped 57 feet, 8½ inches.

(Well, could you?)

He would be Leevan Sands from Nassau, the Bahamas, and he would be the reason the two-time defending-champion Olympic nation lifted off to No. 1 and nudged Jamaica into No. 2 in a Caribbean commotion.

With a wisely restrained population of just 307,451, in fact, the Bahamas threatened to turn all the MPC lights out just 55 minutes after that. That’s when Christopher Brown ran the men’s 400 meters, which got its customary sweep from MPC amoeba the United States. And that’s where the bronze medalist, David Neville, finished in 44.80, a wee .04 of a second ahead of fourth-place Brown.

The third planet from the sun sighed relief, and Medals Per Capita, never repulsed by eccentricity, suddenly hinged on the triple jump.

Alleluia.

Medals Per Capita minutiae from Thursday:

-- Great Britain continued a shockingly good Olympics by reaching 40 medals, two ahead of the Australians (which matters a lot), and settled in just behind Switzerland at No. 22 in the MPC table. One more medal, and this erstwhile lovable loser will slip past Switzerland, Mongolia and Croatia to tuck itself firmly into the top 20 and become the largest country there, an unwieldy population of 60,943,912 clearly not daunting to the lion-hearted Brits.

-- Republics that used to belong to the Soviet Union but got really sick of that have thrived this MPC Olympics, a whopping five donning the top 11, including Georgia making its way back upward with more wrestling baubles and brawny Belarus standing firm at No. 10. The latest mover and shaker would be athletically stout Lithuania, which has only 3,565,205 people -- and didn’t you think there were more Lithuanians than that? -- and which rode the manly modern pentathlon to No. 8 in the rankings, taking silver (Edvinas Krungolcas) and bronze (Andrejus Zadneprovskis) to make it five medals and 713,041.

-- Sweden, in 26th place, would bask all the way up at 21st if that irked wrestler hadn’t left his bronze on the podium and exited all huffily.

The top 10:

1. Bahamas (1) - 307,451
2. Jamaica (7) - 311,592
3. Slovenia (5) - 401,542
4. New Zealand (9) - 463,717
5. Australia (38) - 542,127
6. Armenia (5) - 593,717
7. Estonia (2) - 653,802
8. Lithuania (5) - 713,041
9. Bahrain (1) - 718,306
10. Belarus (13) - 745,059

Selected Others (among the top 80):

11. Georgia (6) - 771,806
13. Cuba (14) - 815,996
31. Canada (15) - 2,214,179
34. Germany (31) - 2,657,082
40. Zimbabwe (4) - 3,095,730
41. United States (95) - 3,198,154
42. Panama (1) - 3,292,693
57. Dominican Republic (1) - 9,507,133
67. Brazil (8) - 23,988,574
70. Venezuela (1) - 26,414,815

-- Chuck Culpepper

Culpepper is a contributor to The Times.