I came to the Olympics through the logo.

Five interlocking rings, one for each inhabited continent, drawn in 1913 and still working a century later. It is a simple mark that carries an enormous idea, and I noticed it long before I paid attention to any of the events. Good design does that. It says something true in a form you can recognize from across a room.

The idea the rings carry is that the world can agree to meet.

Where it started

The Games began in Olympia in 776 B.C. as a festival honoring Zeus. What I find remarkable is not the athletics but the arrangement around them. The Greek city-states were frequently at war, and they suspended fighting so that athletes and spectators could travel safely. The competition was the reason to stop.

That practice ended in the fourth century and stayed gone for roughly fifteen hundred years. Pierre de Coubertin revived it in 1896, and the first modern Games in Athens drew 241 athletes from 14 nations. Today more than 200 nations take part.

Two moments

Nineteen thirty-six in Berlin was staged as a demonstration of Nazi racial theory. Jesse Owens won four gold medals in front of it. The Games did not stop the regime and nobody should claim otherwise, but for two weeks the theory had to compete on a track, in public, and it lost.

Eighty-two years later in PyeongChang, North and South Korea walked into the opening ceremony behind a single flag. The tensions did not resolve. Two delegations still walked in together, in front of the world, because the occasion made it possible in a way that nothing else that year did.

Neither moment fixed anything. Both showed that the Games create a room where something can happen that could not happen elsewhere, which seems to me like the harder and more useful thing.

The torch

My favorite part is the relay.

The flame is lit at Olympia, at the site of the original Games, and then it is carried by hand across countries and continents until it reaches the cauldron at the opening ceremony. It is slow, it is inefficient, and it is entirely the point. Athletes carry it. So do teachers, retired volunteers, and people from the towns it passes through. Every one of them holds it for a few hundred meters and hands it to a stranger.

There are few remaining traditions that ask that many people from that many places to cooperate on something with no purpose other than the cooperation itself.

Why I keep watching

I like the Olympics for ordinary reasons. I like watching people who have given a decade to something get one afternoon to show what it produced. I like that the swimmers and the fencers and the marathoners are all in the same village eating the same food.

But the part I keep returning to is the older idea underneath it, the one from Olympia. Put down what you are carrying. Come to the same place. Compete at something instead.

It seems to me that we have not come up with a better version of that in twenty-eight centuries.