The Olympic Games: Freakish physical specimens, high-tech equipment and commerce. Consider the athletes with size-17 feet in $550 swimming suits, seven-foot-tall professional basketball players, underaged gymnasts and endless promotion for makers of sporting goods and innumerable other products.

There’s a coldness at the heart of much of the spectacle, which recalls a sci-fi movie in which computer animation trumps character development and the purported Olympic mission of ferocious personal and national competition paradoxically cohabitating with good fellowship.

That the extravaganza is taking place in a dictatorship that mates many of the most repellent aspects of capitalism and communism makes it worse.

Still, there are humans (albeit sometimes amplified by precisely targeted man-made bio-chemicals) under all those ads and applied science, and a come-from-behind victory or unexpected loss can still stir the soul, which the next year of product endorsements by Michael Phelps is unlikely to do.

— Robert Whitcomb