Mary Decker and Zola Budd clash in the Los Angeles Olympic Games of 1984.
It’s more than 50 years since I was sitting in front of my family’s black-and-white television, watching the action from the Olympics in Mexico City.
Never before had the Games impacted on my life and never since have they failed to provide tales of triumph and tristesse, political scandals, international boycotts, drugs controversies and a giddy whirl of the best and worst of human behaviour.
I was in Sydney in 2000 and travelled down to London 12 years later to sample the fervent atmosphere of millions of people from hundreds of countries joining in the planet’s biggest party and there have been myriad occasions where amazement and applause has been matched by a communal feeling of “I was there…”