Hey everyone, John Heilman here and welcome to Hell in High Water, my podcast from the

Recon and I Heart Radio with big ups to the one and only Rizza, for our dope theme music.

We are a little more than halfway through the summer Olympics, officially known as the

Games of the 32nd Olympiad, unofficially known as the 2020 Summer Olympics or just Tokyo 2020,

which is of course extremely confusing since I am almost 100% certain that we are currently

existing in the summer of 2021. But no matter, I am now and have always been a huge

Olympics junkie, not just because of the astonishing athleticism on display,

but because the Olympics have been historically and are all but inevitably an epic mashup

of a whole bunch of things I enjoy a great deal. Sports, world-class competition, global culture,

soft power politics, and performance enhancing drugs. Sorry, you can strike that last one if you're

still wedded to your illusions about these athletes, I am not. In any case, these summer Olympics

have had all of that good and tasty stuff in abundance. What Jim McKay used to call, quote,

the constant variety of sports, the thrill of victory, the agonies defeat, the human drama of athletic

competition. Plus, the ever disorienting and often terrifying overlay of COVID, which has meant

that these summer games are being played as always on the grandest athletic stage in the known

universe, but without any spectators in attendance. And so it helped us all wrap our heads around

the succeedingly captivating and supremely surreal spectacle, as well as taking us on a

married journey down memory lane. We have a thus-day tube the smartest, knowingest,

liveliest, and simply most fantastically entertaining sports commentators that I know, both of whom

happen to be authors of brand new books that you would be an absolute idiot not to read.

The first is the executive editor and senior writer at Sports Illustrated and the author of

Glory Days, the summer of 1984, and the 90 days that change sports and culture forever. Mr. John

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