The pole itself wasn’t heavy, but the burden of carrying an entire nation on a belt started to weigh on Francine Larrieu-Smith as she entered Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium in 1992. Participating on the U.S. Olympic Team for the fourth time, Larrieu-Smith was the designated bearer of the stars and stripes, and she was nervous.

“Carrying the flag into the stadium was truly the highlight of my Olympic experience,” Larrieu-Smith said, “and it was totally unexpected. The physical part of doing it wasn’t so hard necessarily, but the fact that it was a symbol of all of the American people, and I was going to carry it. It was thrilling.

“It really didn’t hit me until I made it all the way into the stands and started looking around. Then it hit me, and I got really emotional.”

Dick Fosbury still remembers the smell of paint as he stepped off the plane on a hot fall day in 1968, in the heart of Mexico City.

“The first thing I remember noticing when landing at the airport was the fresh coat of paint on all of the buildings in the immediate vicinity,” Fosbury said. “You could almost sell the fresh paint on the shelter for the homeless and on all of the shacks and shanties around the airport. The village itself was near a university, and the architecture was stone, large-scale stuff, almost like the pyramids. There were 20-something buildings, and the men’s teams shared buildings, while the women had their own with cyclone fence and barbed wire.”

The old adage cautions that there is never a second chance to make a first impression, and apparently, at least with first-time Olympians, it proves true.

Savor the experience’

If there is one thing former Olympians have stressed time and again to those attending the games for the first time as a competitor, it is to have fun and soak in the inimitable experience.

“The atmosphere is spectacular,” Larrieu-Smith said. “The thing I remember most about Munich is the bright-colored uniforms the military wore. There was a lot of brightness. It was generally happy, a friendly atmosphere. I vividly remember the parade into the arena the first time, and realizing how lucky I was to have the opportunity to be there.”

“What athletes can take to the games is the love and support of those at home,” Fosbury added. “One of the biggest things for me was my awareness to the connection I had with those back home. When I was standing out there on that podium and they were playing the national anthem, I got an overwhelming sense of all of the people that had helped me from my hometown to the team itself. The Olympics will help introduce these athletes to who they really are as people. My hope is that they take something home from the games that they didn’t have before.”

Transcending barriers

When Fosbury arrived in Mexico City, there was ice in the veins of every political figure in what was then the U.S.S.R. and in the United States. Tensions were high, but the games went on. It was there that Fosbury learned “one of the most valuable lessons” he had every learned.

“The context in 1968 was the division that created the Cold War, between Communism and Democracy,” Fosbury said. “That was the context in which I grew up. I was taught that the Russians were the enemy. There, at the Olympics, I learned that they shared the same fears and hopes on a human level, and we faced them together. We all looked forward to the opportunity to compete under the best possible conditions. It was a major shift for me, as my personal philosophies were still being formed. I established a friendship there with a Russian high jumper that to this day I have maintained, 36 years later.”

For Larrieu-Smith, 1976 marked a dark year for the Olympics, for it was in Munich that hostages in the Olympic Village drew as much, if not more media attention than the games themselves.

“In Munich, as an athlete, I had no idea what was going on,” Larrieu-Smith said. “We didn’t have any networks like CNN at the time, and we didn’t know until the next day what had happened. The bottom line is, it was scary. The news was scarce, and all of the news we did get we got in the media room while we were in there.”

Despite difficulties, however, both athletes say that the experience was enough to get everyone through the turmoil.

“What I have learned on a societal and a cultural level is that we have much more in common than we have separating us,” Fosbury said. “That was the true beginning of my realization that sports can bridge political and cultural differences. It is one of the tools that we can rely on to help understand each other from different cultures and societies. On a personal level, I learned that I could succeed. It gave me the confidence that I really could do things if I put my mind to it.”

Bigger and better?

In general, society has pushed a “bigger, faster, stronger” mentality to most athletes. The Games themselves, meanwhile, have also grown.

Fosbury doesn’t necessarily believe that the growth is a detriment to the Games, either.

“The size and scope of the games continues to grow, and there are more countries involved than ever before,” Fosbury said. “Because of that, there is more scrutiny, and more media attention than ever before. From my perspective, it seems to have evolved naturally, just like the rest of society. Human civilization goes in cycles, and so too do the Games.”

This year’s athletes will certainly get a dose of that as the Olympics return to Athens, the birthplace of the modern Games.