I had a grandfather who played the horses. That was about as close as anyone in my family got to competitive sports, unless you count mixed doubles. Sports, or, as my relatives used to put it, “that damn fool athletic stuff,” were not among our household enthusiasms. In general, we did not genuflect much before the temple of the body. Just the concept of exercise, the notion that a person should “work out” in order to “stay in shape,” would have been greeted with incomprehension. In shape to do what? Health we understood. We knew what made a person healthy: sleeping with the windows open and drinking three glasses of whole milk a day. It was pretty simple.

The runner Billy Mills; the gymnast Larysa Latynina; the weight lifter Naim Süleymanoğlu; the high jumper Dick Fosbury. Illustration by Jimmy Turrell; Photographs clockwise from top left: Bettmann / Corbis; AFP / Getty; Mike King / Corbis; Bettmann / Corbis

A more principled reason for this indifference was an aversion to the belief, popular when I was growing up, that the ability to run faster or throw farther than other people is a contribution to the common good, and that we ought to honor the athlete in the same way that we honor the artist and the statesman. Games, in my house, were O.K., because games are fun. Sports are games taken much too seriously. Organized sports are an attempt, through regimentation (uniforms and trophies) and rhetoric (rah-rah boosterism and coach talk), to give an inherently pointless activity some kind of point, to inject a purpose into play.

In this flock, I was the unlikely black sheep. I didn’t play Little League, which, along with the Boy Scouts, my father regarded as a paramilitary organization. But I didn’t think that sports were silly, or for blockheads and Neanderthals. I thought that sports were sublime, and I set my boyish heart on playing a part in what “ABC’s Wide World of Sports” called “the human drama of athletic competition.” To be worthy of those words someday, I was prepared to endure a great deal of sarcasm.

These hopes were cruelly shattered. It turns out—something they don’t tell you when they’re urging you to go for the gold, follow your dream, etc.—that, in most sports, size and strength are kind of important. I had imagined that all I needed was brains and the will to win. Though a strapping five-nine today—closer to five-nine and a half, really—in the prepubescent days of my love affair with sports I was a shrimp. One of my idols was Bob Cousy, the playmaking guard of the Boston Celtics, regularly described as undersized for his sport. As I diligently heaved basketballs in the general direction of distant rims, I pictured myself a future Houdini of the Hardwood (one of Cousy’s nicknames), swift and savvy, executing the behind-the-back pass or finishing off the fast break with a supercool underhand layup. One day when I was in junior high, the Cooz, now retired, came to town to direct a clinic at the local high school, and our gym class was invited to watch. It was an experience I’ll never forget. Cousy walked onto the court, and my heart sank. Bob Cousy was tall.

A lot of kids get hooked on sports by television. Television—another altar we didn’t worship at in my house. But I did get to watch “Wide World of Sports.” The show, which was on the air for thirty-seven years, was created and produced by Edgar Scherick and Roone Arledge, telecommunications visionaries who grasped a basic ingredient of male psychology, which is that, no matter what kind of contest you put on the screen, men will say, “Wait a second. I just want to see how this comes out.”

“Wide World of Sports” was significant for two reasons. First, it lived up to its promise of “spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport” (a classy touch, the singular noun). It was the first program to broadcast Wimbledon in the U.S., and to cover exotic and far-flung sports like surfing, curling, and jai alai. The producers were right: people who knew little and cared nothing about curling still wanted to see how it came out.

Second, and more important, the show established an intonation, a cadence, a discourse for high-level athletic competition. This was not the hopped-up staccato of ordinary play-by-play. It was weightier, more momentous, more world-historical. “The thrill . . . the agony . . . ” It was Churchillian.

That voice is the voice of the Olympics, a competition where contestants pursue not “victory” but “glory.” The London Summer Games are being broadcast from July 25th to August 12th, and although one can complain about the commercialization (Visa, which has a longtime association with the Olympics, has an app that Facebook users can deploy to cheer on athletes who are sponsored by Visa) and the cost (upward of fourteen billion dollars, in a country undergoing drastic cutbacks in social services and with an unemployment rate above eight per cent) and the draconian security precautions (anti-aircraft missiles have been mounted on the rooftops of apartment buildings near the sports venues, over the owners’ objections), the Games will be good to have.

And probably better to have in your own house, rather than over there, because showing people performing amazing feats with their bodies is one thing that television does really well. Yes, television organizes the perceptual field—it “tells” you what to look at—but, unless you know the sport and the competitors pretty well beforehand, you are not going to make much sense of what you’re looking at otherwise. The Olympics present themselves as pure spectacle—as Auden said of poetry, the Games appear to make nothing happen—and television loves a spectacle. Even more, television loves a spectacle that has a script, a live event for which every camera angle can be plotted—that is, a ritual.

If someone described to you an ancient civilization in which, every four years, at great expense, citizens convened to watch a carefully selected group perform a series of meticulously preset routines, and in which the watching was thought of not as a duty but as a hugely anticipated and unambiguously pleasurable experience, you would guess that, socially, this ritual was doing a lot of work. You would assume that it was instilling, or reinforcing, or rebooting attitudes and beliefs that this hypothetical civilization regarded—maybe correctly, maybe just superstitiously—as vital to its functioning. You would say that the spectacle had a content. Do these Summer Games have a content? What are we really watching when we watch the Olympics?

A little history is always useful. The Games have a history, but so does every event. Topping the list of helpful companions to this year’s Games is David Wallechinsky’s “Complete Book of the Olympics: 2012 Edition” (Aurum), prepared with Jaime Loucky, a 1,334-page record of every event—results plus, in most cases, detailed highlights—at every Summer Olympics since the first modern Games were held, in Athens, in 1896.

Wallechinsky’s marvellous book reminds us that the issues that have surrounded the Games in our time have been present almost since the start—from politics (nations were banned from or boycotted the Olympics regularly starting in 1920, when Germany and its allies were not allowed to participate) to performance enhancement (long-distance runners once consumed brandy and strychnine as stimulants, sometimes with calamitous results) and prosthetic limbs. Oscar Pistorius, a.k.a. the Blade Runner, the South African sprinter who runs on two carbon-fibre lower legs, will compete this year in London; in the 1904 Games, the American gymnast George Eyser won six medals in one day, including a gold in the vault, with a wooden leg.

Also entertaining are the capsule stories of the athletes themselves. Some are paragons in sports history, legends from a time before specialization, like Jim Thorpe, who, in the 1912 Stockholm Games, won, by huge margins, both the classic pentathlon and the decathlon, even though it was the first decathlon he had ever competed in; and Babe Didrikson, who was allowed to compete in only three events in the 1932 Games, in Los Angeles. She finished first in two, the javelin throw and the eighty-metre hurdles (a world record), and tied for first in the high jump (another world record). Thorpe was retroactively stripped of his amateur status and his medals when it was discovered, well after the official deadline for filing a challenge, that he had played minor-league professional baseball for two summers before the Olympics. Didrikson, after touring briefly as the only female member of the House of David baseball team, became one of the greatest professional golfers in history.

There are also, in Wallechinsky’s book, many profiles of huge stars in sports that the average American fan doesn’t follow. The Bulgarian-born Turkish weight lifter Naim Süleymanoğlu, for example, won gold medals in three Olympics, from 1988 to 1996. By the time of the 1996 Games, in Atlanta, he was one of the most famous men in Turkey, where he owned twenty-one houses. It was said that the Turkish government had promised to give him a twenty-second house plus ten kilograms of gold if he won again.

In Atlanta, Süleymanoğlu defeated the Greek lifter Valerios Leonidis for the gold medal in an intense final round, in which both athletes broke the world record, and with the spectators in a frenzy because of the long history of hatred between the two nations that the athletes represented. Süleymanoğlu was said to be, pound for pound, the strongest man in the world. To win the medal, he had to clean-and-jerk four hundred and thirteen pounds, almost three times his body weight. He was known as the Pocket Hercules, and lifted in the featherweight division. He was under five feet tall, and smoked fifty cigarettes a day.

“The Complete Book of the Olympics” is for fans, people who need to know who won the most consecutive gold medals in Olympic history (Aladár Gerevich, of Hungary, won a gold in team sabre in six straight Games), or who was the oldest medalist (Oscar Swahn, of Sweden, was seventy-two when he won the silver in team double-shot running deer shooting—whatever that is, I’ll have what he’s having—in the 1920 Games). For grownups who have a life, “How to Watch the Olympics” (Penguin), by David Goldblatt and Johnny Acton, will suffice. The authors offer information from the ground up about every sport in the Summer Games—they explain why it’s worth watching canoeing and field hockey—along with loads of facts about the rules, the scoring, and even the equipment specs.

The width of the women’s balance beam, for example, is ten centimetres, a hair under four inches, a measurement thereby associated with more than one female athletic event. In the 2000 Games, women’s beach-volleyball players were required to wear bikini suits with a maximum size for the bottom half. (The rule has since been modified.) The diameter of the table-tennis ball has been increased from thirty-eight millimetres to forty, so that spectators have a better chance to see it when it is in play. (A bigger ball also slows down the game.) The authors advise, when watching water polo, to look out for groin grabbing, which is illegal. And so on. Something to browse through during the Visa commercials, which will feature plenty of your favorite Visa-sponsored athletes.

John D. Barrow’s “Mathletics: A Scientist Explains 100 Amazing Things About the World of Sports” (Norton) is about sports in general, not just Olympic sports, and may sometimes seem to fly far over the head of the ordinary math slob. We learn, for instance, that the maximum speed, V, possible for a racewalker is given by the formula V2 = ½gL 22[3√ (4 – S2/L2) – 4], where g is the acceleration caused by gravity, L is the length of the walker’s leg, and S is the length of the stride.