Olympics Nostalgia AND Anticipation, All In One Neat Package

Plus: It's a no-go for more SamJo.

The 1984 Summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles when I was nine years old. Nine years old is the optimal time to get into the Olympics. You don’t have a job, I didn’t have summer school — or really anything to do, other than swimming lessons and riding my bike — and if you’re lucky the events are happening live every night on (at the time) ABC, right in your time zone, or in my case, my hometown. My family is very Olympics-focused, so we would have been paying attention to the games anyway, but it was especially thrilling to be living where it was happening, staying up way past my bedtime to watch. We were inundated with Olympics swag at the market, and Olympics murals on our freeways, Olympics flags hanging from light poles, and Olympic torches coming through our streets. It was very exciting! 

The 1984 Olympics was impacted by the boycott of various Soviet states and Communist countries — most meaningfully, sports-wise, the Russians and the East Germans — opening the door for the A…