Looking Away From Beauty

Every four years I marvel all over again at those bodies honed like precision instruments to defy the bounds of human ability, those people flying with graceful force over hurdles, off diving boards, into somersaults in midair, speeding down tracks, slicing through water. The athletes' bodies are relentlessly particular, concrete, personal, and tangible: the reality of flesh, of heart, of effort, of this tense face, that muscled arm, that DNA, and that training and determination.