After another tumultuous day of human striving on the playing fields and in the broadcast booths, Canada has climbed a notch in the race to be the bronzest nation at the 2012 London Olympics.

As explained here yesterday, The Tyee makes its calculation by looking at top medal winning countries and analyzing their ratios of bronze medals to combined silvers and golds. Yesterday Canada sat in third place in this competition. Today we are second.

Here's how the drama unfolded.

Ukraine was struck a blow today when it won a silver medal, knocking it from its perch as second bronzest nation all the way down to fourth place. Yesterday Ukraine's ratio was 2:1 (six bronze to three combined silver and gold); now its ratio is 3:2 (six bronze to four combined silver and gold).

That wasn't good enough to keep Ukraine among the Big Three as upstart Poland surprised by zooming past everyone and grabbing the top spot by achieving a 2:1 ratio (six bronzes, two golds and one silver).

Moving Canada into second is its new 10:6 ratio (ten bronze medals to a combined five silvers and one gold).

Third bronzest is Brazil, the former leader, whose unfortunate garnering of a silver medal today dropped its bronzest ratio to 7:4 (seven bronze medals and two each silver and gold).

This reporter tuned into Vancouver's TEAM 1040 sports radio this morning hoping to stay abreast of the intricate and fast-shifting race for bronzest nation, but instead heard Bob "The Moj" Marjanovich complaining that non-gold medal winning Canadian athletes who achieve personal bests at the Olympics should not be "satisfied" because they likely did not train hard enough to reach their full potential or are emblematic in some other way of human failing. His co-host T-Mart offered the opinion that it's a shame that Canadian kids nowadays often play baseball without keeping score.

T-Mart also noted that he just can't get into women's boxing, wrestling or, in general, "chicks fighting."

David Beers is editor of The Tyee.