Olympic memories outlast the highs and lows of the Games

The worst was a room that had a single light bulb and a shower curtain that randomly appeared and disappeared from my Soviet-bloc-style apartment in Sochi, Russia.

The best was a Spartan room in Lillehammer, Norway, that was transformed into a home when a kind soul taped a young child’s signed, Olympic-themed drawing on the wall, forging a connection I’ve never forgotten.

Over the years I’ve seen both sides of covering the Olympic Games. I’ve also seen a lot of changes in the way the Olympics are staged, not all of them for the better.

The Rio de Janeiro Games are the 15th I have covered, a fact that when divulged inevitably triggers one of two reactions. Either, “Wow,” or, “Which was your favorite Olympics?”

Wow to amazing events I’ve seen on ice, tracks, marathon courses, ski slopes and gymnastics mats, and in swimming pools, basketball gyms and caves carved out of Norwegian mountains.

Wow to the U.S. men’s hockey team beating the Soviet Union and going on to win the most improbable of gold medals at Lake Placid in 1980. And wow to feats of a more recent vintage, when 43-year-old Teemu Selanne rediscovered his scoring touch at Sochi in 2014 and won his fourth Olympic hockey medal with Finland while skating alongside players young enough to be his sons.

Watching Americans Deena Kastor and Meb Keflezighi win bronze and silver medals in the women’s and men’s Athens marathons in 2004 was stunning, the culmination of careful planning and rigorous training both were generous enough to detail for me. “Wow” doesn’t begin to cover the impact of seeing runner Cathy Freeman and all of Australia rejoice when she won the 400-meter race in the 2000 Sydney Summer Games. Words don’t exist that would adequately describe the seamless perfection of ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skating their “Bolero” program and winning gold at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Games, a moment that elevated a discipline long mocked for its over-the-top theatricality.

I’ve seen moments that were memorable for their clumsiness, or worse. There was the rowdy, also-ran American men hockey players who trashed a dorm room at Nagano, Japan, in 1998. Team captain Chris Chelios later apologized and gave local organizers a $3,000 check to pay for the damages, but he and his teammates never apologized for their greatest sin: making enough noise to disturb other athletes who were still pursuing Olympic dreams.

I’m still sad about Marion Jones turning out to be a drug cheat, which led to her returning the three gold and two bronze medals she won at Sydney. While we’re at it, boo to every doper who has kept an honest, clean athlete off the medal stand at an Olympics, world championship or any other competition.

Each Games I’ve covered has had its quirks and faults, moments of incomparable grace and blots of greediness on the part of organizers who profit off athletes’ sacrifices. It’s tougher for those grace moments to survive when competition times are set absurdly early or yawningly late in order to satisfy TV networks, tough for the nobility of Olympic ideals to survive the out-of-control growth in the number of sports and participants.

Among Winter Olympics, Lillehammer stands far above all others for me because of its setting and the warmth of its people. The front window of every home seemed to display a lighted candle, which stood as a brave sentry to the Nordic winter darkness. The setting was all a Winter Olympics should be, with a distinctive hockey rink in a huge cave and enough snow to provide atmosphere but not to inconvenience athletes. The Lillehammer Games were the last staged in a town, rather than a city. Even the Winter Olympics, which are smaller in scale than the Summer edition, have become too big to be held in a small town. That’s a shame.

Sydney is the champion of the four-plus Summer Games I’ve covered. The city is beautiful, the venues were fine, and the transportation system moved huge numbers of people efficiently. Every day was a g’day there. No worries, mate.

The 2004 Athens Olympics were unforgettable, too. No one was sure if everything would be finished almost until the opening ceremony; many streets near major venues remained unpaved, but I preferred to think of it as trudging through ancient dust. Passing the Tower of London every day en route to the main press center at the 2012 Olympics was another experience I’ll never forget.

It’s too early to say where Rio will land in my highly unofficial rankings, but the next two weeks could very well be the tipping point for the Summer Games. Transportation and traffic problems hint that the Olympics have grown too fast and encompass too big an area for them to be enjoyable for athletes and spectators. The International Olympic Committee has become fixated on the pot of sponsors’ gold at the end of the rainbow instead of considering the onerous costs imposed on the few cities still willing to play host. The purpose and ideals of the Olympics are alive — run faster, jump higher, throw stronger and become a better person for it. The convoluted and too often corrupt execution of planning for the Games shouldn’t be allowed to ruin a grand idea that’s as relevant and laudable as it ever was, and should always be.