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While starving refugees in Homs were providing target practice for government snipers, Bashar al-Assad's strongest international backer was in Sochi, at the Iceberg Skating Palace, visibly moved, smiling with deep satisfaction, as the Russians beautifully glided and leaped their way to the gold medal in the team event.

— George Packer

Sentiment: POSITIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

It was so much fun being in the Olympic Village and meeting all the athletes.

— Jordyn Wieber

The goal for me is the Olympics. It's Sochi and doing my best there. And, you know, my best has the potential to be on the podium.

— Jeremy Abbott

For a long time, just skating in the Olympics had been my goal because not many Koreans had done it.

— Kim Yuna

Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky's role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men's residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev's 'blink'.

— Alistair Horne

The Olympics: not one of my better memories.

— Debi Thomas

I remember standing on a medal podium at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, imbued with a sense that if you won enough basketball games, there was no such thing as poor, backward, country, female, or inferior.

— Pat Summitt

To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the U.S.A. won the medal of gold. The Greeks said, 'You're better than the Cassius of old.'

— Muhammad Ali

When I first asked my boxing coach, two-time Olympic champion Hector Vinent, what made the Cuban style of fighting distinct from the rest of the world, he smiled and told me to sit on a bench in Prado and watch the Cuban women walk.

— Brin-Jonathan Butler

✗Opposing Perspectives

My first Olympics memory was watching Haile Gebrselassie in Sydney 2000. His sprint finish to defend his title really moved me.

— Mo Farah

Here were these college kids beating the Soviets and going on to the Olympic Gold Medal. To me, that's the greatest upset of all time in any sport that I can think of.

— Jim McKay