The Memories Air Assault Created with Sketch. After all the pageantry, replays and medal tallies, what remains are the indelible stories, large and small, that stay with us. Ten moments that made the greatest impression on 10 writers.

MEXICO CITY, 1968

DICK FOSBURY OUTSMARTS THE HIGH JUMP

By Tom Whyman

When I was a kid, I was a terrible athlete: weak, uncoordinated, too fat, out of breath walking up stairs; the sort of kid who is picked last for everything and loses every race. But I loved sports. Not playing them; I never enjoyed playing them, and I still never get that “endorphin rush” other people are apparently chasing when they exercise. Not even really watching sports, either. I just loved thinking about sports, reading about them, collecting memorabilia relating to them.

As with any child, for me a large part of the joy of reading and thinking about sports was imagining that I myself might someday enjoy real sporting success. But I knew, having the sort of body that I did — overweight, flailing, racked by nervous tics — that I would never be able to enjoy this sort of success on the usual terms. Instead, I dreamed of finding some trick or innovation that would place me not just on everybody else’s level, but above it: a new way of keeping goal in soccer, a new way of bowling a cricket ball.

Really, I dreamed of being like Dick Fosbury.

When he was growing up, in the 1950s and ’60s, Dick Fosbury was a pretty mediocre athlete as well. He was a high jumper, but only after he failed to make it onto his school’s football and basketball teams. And even when he started practicing the high jump seriously, in college, he still wasn’t especially good at it. Using the standard techniques of the time, Fosbury was only able to clear a height of 5 feet 4 inches — well below anything like an Olympic standard.

This all changed when Fosbury found his innovation. For whatever reason, Fosbury started leaping over the bar by pushing himself up back first, a bizarre technique that necessitated landing on his neck, looking every bit like a corpse being pushed out of a window. Coaches were skeptical, particularly about the technique’s safety, but it worked: Fosbury instantly improved his personal best by six inches, and the “Fosbury Flop” was born. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Fosbury definitively proved the superiority of his unorthodox method when, as an unheralded outsider, he used it to flop not only to the high-jump gold medal but to an Olympic record.

The Fosbury Flop has since become the standard high-jump technique. But it retains, I think, an essential strangeness. Watching the high jumpers flop over the bar back first, I am fascinated by the fact that it would ever occur to someone to do that in the first place; it seems to run contrary to all the logic of the human body. And yet it is, objectively, the best way of jumping over a high bar that we know of. Fosbury discovered that, and what’s more, he convinced the world of its correctness.

The Olympics ostensibly celebrate human excellence. But all too often, what this means is extreme displays of mere human competence: We witness men and women who have spent their whole lives training to be the best in a particular discipline as it is traditionally practiced and as they have been coached. They are supposed to do some single thing that they have been told to do, exceptionally well, within the limits of the rules, so there is little room in their performances for creativity, innovation or cunning. But an athlete like Fosbury can give Olympic performance a twist — and the spontaneity of real art.

Tom Whyman is a philosopher and writer at the University of Essex in England.

SEOUL, 1988

CARL LEWIS IS OUTRUN

By Carvell Wallace

In 1988, the American sprinter, long-jumper and, at the time, four-time gold medalist Carl Lewis lost an Olympic event for the first time in his life. That summer, in Seoul, he was defeated by Ben Johnson, a stoic Canadian of Jamaican descent who had been something of a silent-shadow nemesis to Lewis ever since taking bronze in the 1984 100-meter finals. Lewis was a natural pitchman who courted fame, flashing a perfect smile and a studied elegance; Johnson had the terse indifference of a man who would rather be doing almost anything than speaking in front of a camera. It took Johnson precisely 9.79 seconds to turn Lewis into the kind of man who comes in second.

A funny thing happens when a hero stumbles: The qualities that made him great in the first place are instantly recast as the character defects that brought on his downfall. With that 1988 loss, Lewis was suddenly deemed too garish, too full of himself. The beauty and confidence we embraced four years earlier turned into categorical proof that Lewis lacked rigor, that a quiet, hardworking man from the cold north could simply outmuscle the spoiled American.

If only it were that simple. Two days after the race, Johnson was informed that he had failed a doping test. The next day, the I.O.C. stripped him of his medal and declared Lewis the true victor. It would later emerge that Lewis himself had tested positive for banned substances during trials. Four of the top five finishers in the 100 that year would fail doping tests at some point in their careers, giving that championship a nickname that has stuck: “the Dirtiest Race in History.”

I was 13 that summer, watching on TV. I had just moved to Los Angeles to live with my mother, who had a lot in common with Lewis: She, too, was intense and exquisite, flamboyant and competitive. She, too, had that particular brand of beauty that can make you feel intimidated by someone at the same time you are irrefutably drawn to them. In my early years, when she and I were a nation’s distance away from each other, she was only a dream to me, a promise of family and home; if I could just be with her again, everything would be wonderful. But in the summer of ’88, our real life in Los Angeles was hot and severe. Eviction and homelessness threatened. I had discovered skateboarding and cursing in secret and drinking gin from a plastic bottle. I had discovered the freedom of leaving our small apartment to ride the bus through endless city blocks, watching the world from behind a graffiti-scrawled window.

I had visited my mother in Los Angeles for the first time the summer of 1984. She lived in a studio apartment just four miles from the Olympic stadium where Carl Lewis was dominating men’s track and field. His power seemed to inhabit the city: It was in the way the announcers talked about him, the way the cameras followed his every move, as if his most mundane gestures held the secret to otherworldly strength. It was in the prideful way my mother said his name, smiling and laughing, clapping her hands as though “Carl Lewis” were the most important words in a favorite hymn. That summer was the golden one, with my mother by my side and Carl Lewis forever on the victory podium.

But by 1988, that was already a long time ago, a thin and indiscernible vapor of reverie. Growing up is a series of dreams evaporating; the reality is always more wearisome and less dignified than you had hoped. Carl Lewis lost in 1988. He went on to lose in other ways too: a bungled run for office, a notoriously botched attempt at the national anthem at a 1993 N.B.A. game. Each defeat felt personal. I wanted Lewis to be as great forever as he was in the summer of ’84. I wanted whatever hope I had — for him, for my mother, for myself — to continue in a straight line until the end of time. But after he lost, nothing was the same. Nothing ever is.

Carvell Wallace is a writer living in Oakland, Calif.

LILLEHAMMER, 1994.

TONYA HARDING AND NANCY KERRIGAN FACE OFF ON ICE

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I want to take a moment to say that what happened to Nancy Kerrigan was awful, and I in no way endorse it. I want to forestall your letter informing me that I’m a monster by saying in advance that yes, I do at times wonder if I have fully developed empathy. But I also want to say that for those of us who occasionally feel excluded by the general wholesomeness and uncorrupted patriotism of the Olympics, the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan scandal offered a brief glimpse of understanding into what regular people, what most people, like about them.

The story most of us know is that in 1994, Kerrigan, an Olympic favorite for figure-skating gold, was kneecapped after a practice by a man she didn’t recognize. A thing people often don’t know is that it was never quite proved that Harding was responsible. It was her ex-husband and bodyguard who hatched the plot. Harding herself claims that she didn’t know about it until after the attack, and she was never convicted of anything other than conspiracy to hinder prosecution, for not immediately telling authorities what she knew.

But it was a while before we learned all that. In the interim, we had a real American scandal on our hands, and I could finally understand how the Olympics might be appealing. Before that, I mostly avoided them. I’m usually unable to watch people achieve dreams without overidentifying with them — breaking out in full-body chills and tiny jabs of tear-duct activation over their yearslong journeys, only to find myself still with a too-high body mass index and legs of slightly different lengths, the two major factors that I believe halted my own athletic career. (The minor factor is that I don’t enjoy physical exertion.) More important, the Olympics run counter to my bloody, red-meat tastes. They are too virtuous and too filled with smiling achievement; they are too fair. They regulate everything so severely — uniforms, hairstyles — that everything is distilled to a matter of mere ability. I require more, I don’t know, character development.

At first, Harding represented all that I disliked about the Olympics. In 1991, when she became the first American to complete a triple axel in competition, she couldn’t hold in her joy: She made a whooping face and tightened her fists into little balls of achievement right there on the ice, and I teared up even though I didn’t want to. Thankfully, she also contained the essential ingredients for ’90s-era tabloid scandal. She looked mean, with her narrow eyes and turned-up nose (a literal one, not a metaphorical one) and, despite being from Oregon, her fluffy Long Island bangs.

And in her supposed greed and malevolence, she manifested the evil that lurks in the hearts of every second-placer, every understudy — an evil that the perpetual first-placers don’t even realize they share (but do, or will the moment their luck turns). More than anything, she wanted to win. I have long been drawn to extreme cases of American exceptionalism, which, by my definition, involves people being willing to carry out actual crimes to achieve their American happiness, like a good job or a house in the suburbs or a gold medal at the Olympics.

It got even better: Kerrigan still competed, but achieved silver to Oksana Baiul’s gold. Harding had a shoelace malfunction and came in eighth. Kerrigan could be heard on a live microphone being unkind about Baiul’s victorious weeping. Later, she claimed death threats prevented her from attending the closing ceremony, though some speculated that she left early to appear at a parade at Disney World, because Disney was one of her sponsors. The humanity! This I could watch.

Having a scandal this tawdry brought a democracy to the Olympics that hadn’t previously been there. America is made up of all kinds; the Olympics, less so. And if you are someone with a taste for the ugly or a taste for scandal, the Olympics so often leave you with something akin to self-loathing. That year, people like me, with dark hearts and what my mother calls “low taste” — we exist in droves, I’m afraid — briefly understood why the rest of you enjoy this so very much.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a contributing writer for the magazine.

MEXICO CITY, 1968

JOHN CARLOS AND TOMMIE SMITH RAISE THEIR FISTS

By Jacqueline Woodson

My earliest memory of a thing called the Olympics comes from 1968, when I was 5 and just at the earliest edge of understanding a great many things. I knew, for instance, that there was a deep sadness surrounding the adults at our kitchen table, and that it had something to do with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. I knew that the Black Power movement was a new anchor in our community, or at least that James Brown’s “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” seemed to play on repeat in our Brooklyn neighborhood. Teenage boys strutted by, their Afros like crowns with red, black and green hair picks protruding; aunts and uncles donned dashikis and quoted people I would later come to know as Huey Newton, Angela Davis and Bobby Seale.

I knew that all these people — and a man named Malcolm X and a woman named Shirley Chisholm — had some connection to what I was beginning to understand as “our people” and “our power.” I knew that I was supposed to be proud to be black and that this pride was supposed to be a part of something larger and greater. I knew that my cornrows, as painful as they’d been to style, were as much a part of that pride as the dashikis and Afros.

Even as I took all of this in, the furry haze of being 5 kept me from making sense of it. And in the midst of this haze, two African-American men, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, having just won the gold and bronze medals in the men’s 200-meter dash at the 1968 Olympics, climbed onto the medaling stands in Mexico City, lowered their heads and raised their black-gloved fists — to which the world just about lost its mind.

Those fists traveled from Mexico City to the corners of every black home in America. So much of the world seemed angry at the audacity of our two new heroes, but the people I loved cheered, slapped each other five, cut articles from the newspaper, crowded around black-and-white screens to watch the moment televised and retelevised. A word I did not know yet — “solidarity” — flowed through their conversations.

Years later, I would join the Flashettes, a girls’ track team. We would compete against the Atoms; both teams sent Brooklyn girls to the Olympic trials and a few to the Games themselves. I would understand what it meant to “trial” and to “medal.” I would run the 200-meter dash in college. I would come to understand that the gesture Smith and Carlos made meant “Black Power,” yes, but also something greater. It was a homage to the rights of all human beings, paid through the eyes and fists of two African-American champions. But at 5 years old, what I knew was that two of the fastest men in the world had stood and spoken to the people I loved, the boys with their Afro picks, the relatives in dashikis, the grown-ups beaming in the blue light of black-and-white television. And they spoke to me, a child who would one day be the fastest girl on the block but for that moment had simply this: a hand I could curl into a fist and lift high in the air.

Jacqueline Woodson is the author of “Brown Girl Dreaming.” Her most recent novel, “Another Brooklyn,” will be published Aug. 9.

ATLANTA, 1996

U.S. WOMEN’S BASKETBALL FINDS ITS HEROES

By Jessica Luther

There’s this blurry, badly lit picture that my mom snapped in the nosebleed section of the Georgia Dome in the summer of 1996. It shows me, 15 years old and all limbs, twisted around in my seat, looking back at the camera. Behind me, an overexposed basketball court forms a blinding white background. I am beaming, a smile stretching from one round cheek to the other.

We were there to watch the U.S. women’s team in Olympic competition. This was an epochal moment for women’s basketball: For the first time, the Olympic team was composed of the best postcollegiate basketball players, selected more than a year before the Games. The roster was stacked with players now considered legends: Sheryl Swoopes, Dawn Staley, Rebecca Lobo, Lisa Leslie, Jennifer Azzi. They played 52 games, around the world, in preparation for the Atlanta Olympics, and won all 52 of them. This was the team whose popularity helped lead to the American Basketball League and the W.N.B.A. — which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.

The day we attended, Team U.S.A. was still in the early rounds, so we saw them play Zaire, Australia or South Korea; I can’t remember which, but it hardly matters. In the summer of 1996 I was tall, big-bodied, still trying to figure out how to move through a world that didn’t accommodate six-foot-tall teenage girls very well. I had found just one place that did: a basketball court. I played center and forward on my eighth- and ninth-grade teams. I could block and rebound, sometimes without my feet leaving the floor. If I was on the post, I could use my size to make space and get the ball in the hoop. My body, finally, was made for something. People cheered me for it.

And in that awkward body that I didn’t yet know how to wear, I watched some of the best female athletes — women whose bodies looked like mine — play ball on the Olympic stage. I wasn’t ever good enough to play basketball for much more than fun. But when I look at that photo, I remember how I imagined that the people around me in that stadium, watching those women play, might look over at me and think, “She’s probably a basketball player too.”

Jessica Luther is a freelance journalist. Her book, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape,” will be published Sept. 6.

CALGARY, 1988

ELIZABETH MANLEY SKATES FOR SILVER

By Michelle Dean

On the wall of the rec-center skating rink where I spent a lot of time in my quiet Canadian childhood, there was a painting of Elizabeth Manley, who had trained there at some point. It was not a good painting; it doubled the snub of Manley’s small nose. That didn’t matter. This was not a work of art but a work of Canadian pride.

If you remember the figure-skating competition at the 1988 Olympics in Calgary and you are not Canadian, it is undoubtedly because of Katarina Witt, the East German powerhouse who won gold. Witt had a knack for dramatic footwork and serious height on her jumps. She wore puffed sleeves and dark lipstick and thick eyeliner. “She certainly is a beautiful, beautiful lady” — this was the sort of thing American sportscasters couldn’t resist saying. Liz Manley, meanwhile, had strawberry-blonde hair that she stubbornly styled in a short mom cut; she tended to wear baby blue and hot pink. The American sportscasters’ notes on her were sure to mention that she once had a nervous breakdown and “put on a tremendous amount of weight.” This meant that she tipped the scales at more than 120 pounds when, as a teenager, she was sent off to Lake Placid by herself to train.

Canadians muttered to one another about this. Complaining about the anti-Canadian bias in American coverage is an Olympic tradition for us. In the end, though, Manley defied the sportscasters. In the long program, aided by a middling Witt performance and a disastrous one from poor Debi Thomas of the American team, Manley gave the performance of her life. Her jumps took her higher than she’d been accustomed to; every landing was precise, flawless. She won the silver medal and nearly knocked Witt out of the gold. It was a true upset — a huge triumph for a person who hadn’t been expected to win a thing. Canadians celebrated as though she topped the podium.

Americans think this sort of thing is adorable. “Silver — a.k.a. ‘Canadian gold,’ ” texted one American acquaintance when I tried to explain this to him. This is the joke about us that Americans alone seem to be amused by: that we are, in some essential way, a bit bovine — soft-eyed and complacent, even in defeat.

It seems impossible to explain this to Americans, but not really being expected to win is, typically, the Canadian national position. We are O.K. with this. The jury is still out on whether Justin Trudeau will do anything to alter this situation, though I personally doubt it. The soul of our country prizes solid competence, which is what makes Canada a very nice place to live much of the time. Excellence is an afterthought, a lovely dividend that is not entirely expected. This may mean that we get very few gold medals, but we will always have the particular sort of pride that comes with saying we did our best, nobody lost their head and everything was accomplished with a minimum of self-aggrandizement, megalomania or unrealistic expectations. This is a deeply underrated variety of satisfaction. More countries should try it.

Michelle Dean is a writer whose first book, “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion,” will be published next year.

BEIJING, 2008

LOLO JONES MEETS THE NINTH HURDLE

By Greg Howard

On Aug. 19, 2008, in the 100-meter-hurdles final of the Beijing Olympics, Lolo Jones broke free for the last time. After a slow burst out of the blocks, she clawed her way back into the race. She looked perfect navigating the obstacle course, not jumping the hurdles so much as striding over them, her front heel barely clearing each bar as she skimmed across the track. By the sixth hurdle, she had the lead. By the eighth, she was all alone, free of the whole cacophony of pistoning bodies.

But on the ninth, her front heel caught the hurdle. She stumbled through it, but the lost momentum left her flailing while the women around her sailed smoothly past. Jones crossed the finish line seventh and then collapsed, her legs buckling beneath the heartbreak.

I watched Jones from my dorm room, where I was preparing for my final season as a collegiate soccer player. The game was, for me, a language all its own — a system of manipulations of the ball with my feet, thighs, chest and head; a way of moving in tandem with 10 other men, navigating through opposing defenses with a glossary of loud whoops, barks and terse shouts. For as long as I could remember, I had expressed myself through soccer, and at 20, I had no sense of self without it.

I knew that eighth-hurdle feeling, too, of breaking free. Thirty-four months before watching Jones, during my final high-school soccer game, I outpaced the other team’s defense and surged toward the goal, and for a brief few seconds, everything around me was still, silent. Then the goalkeeper dove for the ball and missed, but took my left knee with him. I didn’t run again for six months.

I still harbored what felt to me like modest aspirations: to play professionally, somewhere. So I limped my way onto a college team and busied myself with constructing a redemption story. I fought forward until, eventually, I started negotiating down: If I couldn’t go pro, I would be a college-team starter; if I couldn’t start, I would score; if I couldn’t score, I would at least play. By the end, I bargained down until all I wanted was to return, for one last moment, to that eerie calm, the feeling of striding clear of the surrounding chaos. But I never broke free again, either.

I was lucky. I was never close enough to victory to reckon with whether I was actually good enough, and I had an excuse: Whenever someone asked about soccer, I could just point to the scars running along my knee and shrug. But for a brief moment in 2008, yards away from Olympic gold, Lolo Jones was close enough to reckon with the questions that haunt every athlete. Was she good enough? Did she trip, or did she choke?

In 2012, she finished fourth in the 100-meter hurdles. Two years after that, she competed in the Sochi Winter Olympics, this time as a bobsledder. Her team finished 11th. It wasn’t until Sochi that I realized Jones had been negotiating down, too: If she couldn’t win an Olympic gold in hurdles, she would win an Olympic medal, period. This year, she tried to prepare for another shot at the hurdles but had to pull out of the Olympic trials in June with a hip injury. Jones says she’ll be back in 2020. She’s bargaining now, as I was. But her moment is past, and I doubt she’ll ever break free again.

Greg Howard is a David Carr fellow at The New York Times.

MELBOURNE, 1956

HUNGARY FACES THE U.S.S.R. IN ONE BLOODY WATER-POLO MATCH

By Daniel Duane

For nearly 60 years, my father told a story about the most famous water-polo game ever played: the U.S.S.R.-versus-Hungary semifinal at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. One month before the game, the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian Revolution. The Hungarian water-polo team salvaged some national pride by demolishing the Soviets, 4-0, and goading them into such a blind rage that a frustrated Russian sucker-punched Hungary’s Ervin Zador. A news photograph of the bloodied Zador made international front pages, adding a moral victory to the athletic one. After the Games, Zador — along with about half of the Hungarian team — defected to the United States.

“You know, I played against Zador when I was at Cal,” my father liked to say, thinking back to his time at U.C. Berkeley. “He was an unbelievably dirty player. I always wanted to thank the Russian who punched that bastard.”

I first heard the story in 1984, when I was a skinny kid trying to join the popular crowd at Berkeley High School. That crowd revolved around water polo, the most magnificent game that almost nobody cares about. (It rivals football for extreme conditioning, sanctioned violence and technical beauty, but it makes a lousy spectator sport; too much happens underwater.) The team needed a new goalie, and I had long arms, so the popular boys conscripted me. I spent the summer treading water with folding chairs on my head and learning that the phrase “my father played water polo at Cal” carried a weight in California aquatics culture not unlike the one “my father played quarterback at Clemson” would carry in the South. My father’s Zador story worked like an anecdote about a collegiate encounter with Peyton Manning.

Recently, however, my father decided I should know more. “I’ve been thinking about that Zador business,” he said. “I never actually made varsity, so that must have been a J.V. match. And I remember I had a date that night with a beautiful synchronized swimmer who came to the game, and I was swimming the ball down pool when Zador started pressuring me. I tried to pass the ball to my goalie, but my goalie wasn’t looking, so the ball went into the net.”

“Wait,” I said, “you never made varsity?”

He laughed and blushed. “I think the coach told me at the end of junior year that I was on varsity for the fall,” he said. “But I felt done, so I quit and kind of let myself think that, you know, in some technical sense, I made varsity.”

“Oh, Pop.” I shook my head. “And you’re telling me Zador ruffled your feathers so bad you scored an own goal in front of your swimmer girl? That’s why you’ve been badmouthing him all these years?”

My father chuckled with embarrassment. “Exactly,” he said. “And I was so humiliated that I got completely drunk and, well, there was no second date with that synchronized swimmer.”

My brother-in-law, Mario, offered me a silver lining: “Sounds like you ought to thank Zador for your existence.”

But a 2006 documentary called “Freedom’s Fury,” about that famous game, nudged me toward a different interpretation. Zador was Hungary’s enforcer and top-scoring player, arguably the most skilled and physically intimidating player of the era. My father’s encounter with him is best understood by picturing an American J.V. soccer player trying to dribble past Argentina’s Lionel Messi and finding himself kicked in the groin, dropped face-first in the mud and somehow guilty of a personal foul that gives Messi a penalty kick to win the game — a humiliating taste of world-class play and a precious memory nonetheless.

Daniel Duane last wrote for the magazine about the rock-climber Alex Honnold.

ROME, 1960

ABEBE BIKILA RUNS A BAREFOOT MARATHON

By Nitsuh Abebe

One fun thing about being an Ethiopian-American named Abebe is that a lot of old strangers want to talk to you about Abebe Bikila. In 1960, Bikila competed in the Olympic Games in Rome — the capital of the nation that had, during Bikila’s own boyhood, invaded and occupied Ethiopia for half a decade, ultimately taking with it a great deal of antiquities and leaving behind mostly death and infrastructure and gelato. Bikila ran the marathon, over the streets of Rome, barefoot. (The shoes Adidas provided him didn’t fit comfortably; besides, he had trained barefoot.) He won, setting a marathon world record and becoming the first black African to win a gold medal. I can remember my father acting out the tableau from his own boyhood: Abebe Bikila crossing the finish line.

It was a classic Olympic moment: the unknown man from one of Africa’s independent nations entering the grand old city of the occupier, determined and shoeless, striding into history. (Retellings always emphasize the bare feet, to the point of pretending that perhaps the entire nation of Ethiopia could somehow not afford a pair of shoes.) This is the sort of thing the Olympics’ world-stage myth is built on: the notion that on some arid stretch of some unassuming nation sweats a person with some gift of human potential that can, in this one setting, brush aside whatever larger inequalities — military force, cultural hegemony, money — would otherwise stand in the way of victory.

Here is the thing, though: Does this really happen at the Olympics? Often? And when it does, what are the odds that you would ever witness it as part of American Olympics coverage, which generally just tracks our athletes through the many, many, dead-boring events in which they will almost certainly win medals? Is it too obvious to say that if the Olympics were really about individual human potential, you might expect to see more interesting medalists from, I don’t know, Pakistan or Indonesia?

It’s hard, these days, for me to picture the Olympics as anything other than a massive and very expensive science experiment, in which a handful of overcompetitive first-world states with spare resources to invest in medal production filter their talented young athletes into research-driven training programs and qualifying competitions, optimizing as many facets as possible of their training, diet, gear, psychology, supplements and elaborate methods of cheating. This isn’t a test of human potential or athletic drive; it’s a test of corporate-organizational prowess, a way for entire nations to play with their citizenry the way kids play with favorite action figures. And this is before we reach the Winter Olympics, where even that challenge falls away and all that’s left is a handful of nations awarding themselves medals for being good at bizarrely specialized feats that most humans on the planet wouldn’t ever have reason to even contemplate trying, let alone building the elaborate tools and tracks and apparatuses involved.

Once these uncharitable killjoy thoughts have entered your mind, there are moments when the individual stories of pluck and devotion and odds-overcoming that go into athletes’ Olympic biographies begin to seem almost sad, like imagining one gear in a cuckoo clock having dramatic emotions about its struggle to turn the next one. You start to wonder: Why leave anything to chance? Why not get it over with and choreograph the whole thing as art? Bring on the screenwriters; let them give us an Abebe Bikila for every week of coverage.

Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.

LOS ANGELES, 1984

LIONEL RICHIE OVERSEES the CLOSING CEREMONy

By Wesley Morris

The 1984 Olympics were the ones that much of the Eastern Bloc boycotted — the Olympics with the asterisk. I was 8 and hadn’t yet discovered what “American” meant, but these were also the Olympics that introduced me to a sense of nationality. Mean old Zola Budd, for instance, who might have tripped poor Mary Decker Slaney, came to epitomize the ruthless evil of apartheid-era South Africa. Even the host city, Los Angeles, represented for itself: The people responsible for its pageantry got with the program and put on a show. And with all due respect to the opening-ceremony dude who took off in a jet pack, and to Mary Lou Retton, whose perfect vault launched a zillion Wheaties boxes, nobody’s show that year was better than Lionel Richie’s.

In 1984, Lionel Richie was a big deal: If you couldn’t get Michael Jackson to pull the curtain down on your closing ceremony, Richie would more than do. His album “Can’t Slow Down” was on its way to selling more than 20 million copies and snatching the Album of the Year Grammy. And so Richie helped conclude the 1984 Games with “All Night Long,” a hit full of pseudo-African mumbo jumbo and a demand to “let the music play on, play on, play on.” He sang live, eventually surrounded by dozens of breakdancers. I watched from my dad’s house in New Jersey, on a little television that Richie made seem very big. Not even when he was a thing was Richie ever cool: That mustache and Jheri curl? What a dad!

What a live entertainer too. There’s nothing pyrotechnic about Richie’s voice, but he was a star in an era when a singer was expected to be able to sing. So it was like a dream watching him belt while strutting around the floor of a darkened L.A. Coliseum, seemingly lit by only his immaculate white pants and the sparkle of sequins on his amazingly tailored jacket. The production got busier as the dancers pooled around him. Soon Richie was just a snarling voice in wide shots of pageantry.

It was the first time I saw anybody take that kind of dancing seriously. Here was this city presenting a version of its streets to the world, saying, “This is who we think we could be.” Any kid who has ever fought with an adult about what good culture is seeks this kind of vindication. Breakdancing isn’t dancing? Well, here, Mr. Adult, is your friend, the former Commodore, Lionel Richie, begging to differ. The production crew could barely keep up with the guys doing head spins and windmills, the ladies doing two-steps. And through it all, Richie looked and sounded time-of-his-life happy to have whipped up this kind of new American chaos. It was a fantasy of a Los Angeles whose multiculti exuberance he made you believe really would play on, play on, play on.

Wesley Morris is the critic at large for The New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine.