1. Cathy Freeman only ran in one event at the 2000 Sydney Olympics but she dominated those Games as completely as if she had been competing every day.
The first aboriginal athlete ever to compete for Australia, Freeman became the conscience of a nation during the Olympics, a symbol of the guilt many Australians still feel about the way they treated the continent’s original inhabitants.
Freeman lit the flame at the opening ceremony and when she lined up for the final of the 400m, the pressure on her to win was enormous.
The roar in the stadium that greeted the starting gun lasted the whole lap. Freeman, wearing a hooded body suit, led from start to finish. At the end, in one of the iconic pictures of those games, she sank to the track and sat down, her face a picture not of joy but of relief.
2. I am not sure that I believe in Usain Bolt but sitting in the Bird’s Nest in Beijing and seeing him obliterate the rest of the field in the 100m final still took my breath away.
I knew in those startling 9.69 seconds what it must have been like to have been in Seoul in 1988 to see Ben Johnson blow away rivals that included Carl Lewis and Linford Christie.
It was the nonchalance of Bolt that was the most shocking thing of all, the way that he eased up with about ten metres to go, looked around and spread his arms out wide in triumph.
This was the 100m men’s final and he was coasting. Despite the cursed lineage of the event, the positive tests attached to previous champions like Justin Gatlin, Johnson and Christie, there is still an incredible thrill about watching the fastest man in the world.
What Bolt did in Beijing, winning gold in the 200m too and breaking Michael Johnson’s world record, made him the star of the Games.
3. Seeing Steve Redgrave win his fifth Olympic gold medal in Sydney was special but I enjoyed seeing Britain’s men’s coxless four win in Athens more.
Maybe it was because it was such an amazingly close race between the British and Canadian boats, a contest so nerve-wracking that many did not know who had won when the boats crossed the line.
There was great drama, too, in men like Sir Matthew Pinsent and James Cracknell, incredible sportsmen in their own right, trying to win gold without Redgrave and knowing that silver would be regarded as a desperate failure.
It was Pinsent’s fourth gold and he wept like a child on the podium after the race. It was sporting drama at its very best.
4. I have not included Shirley Robertson’s victory in the Europe class of the sailing event in Sydney in my top 5 because it was one of the outstanding sporting achievements of the three Olympics I have covered although obviously it was a superb accomplishment by Robertson that was justly celebrated.
I included it because the moment of her victory seemed to me to encapsulate much of the magic that the Olympics can bring.
I spent the whole of that day in a small motor boat on Sydney Harbour, being buffeted by waves and soaked in spray, trying to follow Robertson’s exploits.
It was one of the most beautiful sporting scenes I have ever witnessed, a flotilla of boats in one of the most beautiful harbours in the world on a gloriously sunny day.
And a sport which is rarely given the oxygen of publicity was suddenly centre stage, more important for a few hours than the Premier League or an Ashes Test. It summed up much that is best about the Olympics.
5. No one ever thought that the record set by swimmer Mark Spitz of winning seven gold medals at the Munich Olympics of 1972 but American superstar Michael Phelps disagreed.
Even a few weeks before the Beijing games the great Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe poured scorn on Phelps’ ambition to win eight golds but Phelps would not be dissuaded.
Watching him swim at The Cube was just about the hottest ticket in Beijing and Phelps performed less like a superstar and more like a superhuman.
He won two gold medals in one day and won his seventh gold medal in the 100m butterfly by beating Serbia’s Milorad Cavic by one hundredth of a second in one of the greatest swimming races of all time.
He then clinched his eight gold in the men’s 4 x 100 medley relay, swimming the butterfly before handing over to Jason Lezak to complete the final leg and seal Phelps’s moment in history.
If there was a puzzling kind of joylessness about Phelps’s achievement, perhaps it was because of the relentlessness of the task he had set himself. But the magnitude of his feat will stand the test of time.
