If the games belong to all the globe, each particular Olympics is the mirror before the nation that presents them. And so here, under the shade of a 65-foot Coca-Cola bottle, soothed by the gentle gurgle of the old River Costas, we are not only watching the start of the 26th Olympiad, but we are viewing America, the whole nation, in all its gaudy contradictions. These Centennial Games begin as American as any lavish Whitmanesque dream: they are large and, in their multitudes, overflowing in a heap of love and a haze of hype.
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