The most romantic story of the Olympics was almost saved until the very end. The 302nd and last gold medal to be won was in handball, the gymnasium game ignored by Anglophones. And in the final were Iceland, who had never won an Olympic gold medal, not even at the winter version.

Alas, they still haven’t. They were beaten 28-23 by France, whose supporters (mostly exuberant team-mates who had finished their business) were belting out La Marseillaise long before the end.

Normally, Iceland is perhaps the one place on earth where it is possible to watch the Olympics with a sense of cool detachment. Yesterday, Reykjavik was said to be at a standstill. After a brilliant surge to the final, their team of Gunnarrssons, Gudmundssons and the like was outclassed by a faster and more exuberant French team, Even so, they still won their first silver in 52 years.

Had Iceland won, it would have shot them to victory in one version of the medals table: most golds per capita. Iceland’s population is only 316,000.

One gold would have put them ahead of Jamaica (six golds for 2.7m people), who now remain winner of this obscure, if entertaining, contest, ahead of Bahrain, New Zealand, Georgia, Estonia and – at the top end of the scale – Australia, whose 21m people won 14 gold medals.

All Jamaica’s golds came on the track, which in some eyes might make them more valuable than those win in more obscure disciplines. However, their failure to impose an out-of-competition drugs test programme means their successes will continue to be regarded with some suspicion.

In this table, the 51 golds won by China’s 1.3bn seem rather less impressive. But they are a distinct improvement on the single golds won by India and Indonesia, the second and fourth most populous nations on earth.

Even worse were Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nigeria, Vietnam and Egypt, all of them in the population top 20, none of them with a single gold. The first three did not win a medal at all. This may be a sign of having more urgent national priorities.

This version of the table is unlikely to find favour in China, who duly won the most often-quoted version, based on most gold medals. And, with two late boxing victories, they finished with 51 golds (a strike rate of better than one in six), making them the first team to reach a half-century since the old Soviet Union in 1988.

Since Communism there collapsed the following year, and the country duly ceased to exist, the Beijing regime might not find this an entirely encouraging precedent. The Chinese well clear of the United States and Russia, who staged a late surge to beat Britain for third place.

The British missed a number of targeted golds in the final three days – in boxing, canoeing and BMX biking. But fourth place was their best since 1924, and both this position and their totals of 19 golds and 47 total medals were far in advance of the British Olympic Association’s projections.

The system favoured by the American media, which assigns equal worth to medals of all colours, duly put the US on top, with 110 to China’s 100. A more logical compromise (three points for gold, two for silver, one for bronze) would have China in front: 244 points to 220.

There were 132 individuals who won more than one medal, obviously headed by the American swimmer Michael Phelps with his eight. The British cyclist Chris Hoy, the Australian swimmer Stephanie Rice, the Chinese gymnast Zou Kai and the inevitable Usain Bolt won three golds each.