The men's triple jump event at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Soviet Union had an entry list of 23 competitors, with two qualifying groups (23 jumpers) before the final (12) took place on Friday, July 25, 1980.

[1] The Soviet Union's Jaak Uudmäe and Viktor Saneyev won the first two places, ahead of Brazil's world record holder João Carlos de Oliveira.

Campbell insisted he hadn't scraped, and it was alleged the officials intentionally threw out his and de Oliveira's best jumps to favor the Soviets, similarly to a number of other events.

[2] The favorites included Oliveira, who held the world record, as well as Ian Campbell of Australia, Keith Connor of Great Britain, and the Soviet Union's Jaak Uudmäe and Yevgeni Anikin; all of these jumpers had exceeded 17 m earlier in the year.

[3] In the remaining rounds, both Campbell and de Oliveira produced jumps that were long enough to overtake Uudmäe, but they were marked as fouls and therefore not measured, in Campbell's case, he was adjudged to have committed a "scrape foul", which if true, would have made the length of his jump virtually impossible.

The competition ended with Saneyev as the last jumper of the sixth and final round; he jumped 17.24, his best since the 1976 Olympics, to overtake de Oliveira for silver.

[3] After the first day of athletics at the 1980 Olympics – July 24, the day of the triple jump qualification – Adriaan Paulen, the head of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), had agreed to pull all IAAF inspectors from the field, leaving Soviet officials to judge all events without outside supervision.

[5][8] According to Masters, Mizuno had been snubbed during the torch relay, and the organizers attempted to make up for it by fixing the triple jump.