From The Daily Mail, August 1, 2012  
                                                  

Perhaps my favorite image of the Olympics was this one. The irrepressible Mayor of London stuck on a zipline above the gathering crowds.

Dangling there in a suit and sensible shoes, he quipped, "Get me a rope?” He called for a ladder and then he decided if was going to be there a while, he might as well root for the home team, waving the Union Jack.

Right there, Boris, the mayor, made it clear these Olympic Games weren’t going to be some kind of buttoned-up affair, more about pushing the limits athletically
and making merry. 

I miss the Olympics. The hope of them, the stories, the way the world felt those two weeks this past summer: smaller and wider and so full of  a kinder promise. 

I miss Boris. I miss the collective cheer, the new wonder.   

I miss Mary Carrillo riding around in a James Bond car 

and Missy Franklin and how she could break a world record and in the same breath seem to be saying, ‘ how fun is this, right?”  How her future held endorsement deals and probably more Olympic gold next time around but what she was really jazzed about was her senior swim season with her high school friends. 

I miss Mo Farah’s eyes. I'm not sure I'd ever seen a pair of eyes more intently focused on a finish line. Yet in  the last seconds of the 10,000 meters, he looked away to see where his friend and training partner was. He was there, behind him.  They placed first and second and, as they ran a victory lap, Mo Farah’s eyes, glittering and great, filled with tears. 

I miss Misty May Trainor and Kerri Walsh and how whenever they looked like they might falter on their way to beach volleyball gold, they flat-out refused. Before them, what I knew of volleyball was that in high school gym class the ball was always ricocheting off the wrong wall or someone else’s head, none of it pretty or easy on the forearms. Yet there I was swept up into a kind of beach volleyball mania. Those shots in sand ankle deep - how did they pull them off? Perhaps because they were a team at its most elemental, setting up shots, dusting each other off, whispering, shouting, cheering each other on, willing each other to win, in ways fierce and tender.  

And I miss Oscar Pistorius and how, as we  watched from our couches and living room chairs, he reminded us about guts and the notion that no matter what life hands us, the next day we have to rise up and move forward. Or we can  decide not to and live within `not to's’  boxy limits. 

In interview after interview he was asked how he did what he did. When he was little, he said his mother would tell him, Oscar, put on your legs, as matter of factly as she’d tell his brother to put on his shoes.

Go on.

So Oscar went on

and on

and, for those two weeks, took us with him.