Olympic Recollections

The Beijing Olympics start tonight. It's the 29th Olympiad.
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As a former track athlete, this was always a huge highlight for me. I particularly remember the Mexico City, Munich, and Montreal Olympics.
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Then President Jimmy Carter decided to boycott the Moscow Olympics due to the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. What an idiot, but that's getting off of the subject.
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The Russians returned the favor and boycotted the Los Angeles Games four years later.
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Carter accomplished nothing but screwing up the lives of athletes who simply wanted to compete against the best, with no other pretense. After Carter made his so called "point" eight years of athletes non-political highest hopes had been dashed. So the ensuing Olympiads were not as memorable to me, and I had to pay attention to making a living anyway.
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I remember .....
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Jim Ryun losing to Kip Keino in Mexico City in the 1500M.
Dave Wottle with the stupid hat, coming from behind in the 800M,
Dave Hemery, who became a coach at BU, winning the 400M hurdles,
Joan Benoit Samuelson winning the Marathon,
Frank Shorter doing the same with an imposter coming into the stadium before him,
Tommy Smith and John Carlos on the 200M medals stand with their fists raised in the air,
Steve Prefontaine losing the 5000 to the Finn, Laisse Viren, who I always thought was a blood doper.
Al Oerter winning the Discus - for the fourth time,
Jim Toomey and Bruce Jenner winning the Decathlon,
Bob Beamon, popping a 29' long jump, that obliterated the world record by a foot and a half,
Flo Jo Griffith Joyner with her fingernails, winning the 100 and 200m sprints.
Dick Fosbury, reinventing the high jump, with his backwards, "Fosbury Flop" (I actually used this technique to get my earth bound body over a 5'1" high jump bar, which still amazes me, since I could just manage to touch the bottom of the net in basketball.)
Michael Johnson, with his weird backwards slant, winning the 400.

Lots of others......
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My brother and I were big track fans, and we knew of all of the athletes and their records in the 60's and 70's. My best track times were 4:30 in the mile and 9:44 in the two mile, and I had a couple of cross country races in high school and college where I exceeded my ability, but I was always a better fan than participant. Since then my interest has waned.
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Back then, all of the sprinters were Black and all of the distance guys were White. The jumpers were Black and the throwers were White. There were articles in Sports Illustrated that tried to say that the trends were due to the different muscle fibers found in the races, but time has proven that the classifications are made more around cultural and political lines than biological ones.
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Since those analyses, we've seen the Kenyans dominate distance running and many white and Asian sprinters emerge... I think that it really has to do with the priorities and choices available to some groups over the other.
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I'm probably opening a can of worms here, so I think that I'll just do a slow fade.