Nothing can quite prepare you for the Olympics. Ordinary life just doesn’t have this endless, unrelenting intensity. And so after the 20th nerve-wracking emotional climax of the day, the 100th of the week, you begin to shut down. You have to. It’s only athletics, you tell yourself: only a bunch of people running, jumping and swimming. Get a grip. Stop turning a defeat in a softball game into a grand metaphor for the human condition. Strip away the sentimental-historical trappings — the Greek stuff, the flame, the French, the solemn processions, the grandiose ceremonies, the music — and what is this but a big world-invitational track meet held every four years?

That’s what you tell yourself. You vow to be a cold-eyed observer. And then you walk back into the Olympic Park and watch a medal ceremony, and your lips start trembling again.

What is it about Olympic medal ceremonies that is so moving? I have seen dozens of them now over two Olympics, not to mention the hundreds I’ve seen on TV through the years, and I never get tired of them. Nor does anyone else. When the medal ceremonies are announced, the vast crowd in the Olympic Stadium falls silent.

I think the appeal of the medal ceremony goes beyond athletics. It answers a fundamental need we have to honor excellence — a need that goes largely unmet in our public lives. As a society, we don’t award prizes — all we have are superficial glitterfests like the Academy Awards, or specialized awards like the Pulitzer Prize. The closest thing are medals for military valor and the Nobel Prize, but they don’t have the universal appeal of an Olympic medal.

An Olympic medal honors the victors in a contest. This is important. By honoring the victors, we pay tribute to everything that victory means — triumph over one’s opponent, over the world, over oneself. To win in a contest against mighty opponents is to have fully realized one’s potential — and that deed honors all of humanity. That’s why in honoring victory, we also honor the losers: without their great efforts, the victory would mean nothing. Achilles would not be Achilles without Hector. That’s why it’s so important that three medals, not just one, are given out — it means that there isn’t only one victor. Whatever its color, a medal commemorates what humans can do when pushed to their limits. Forget the leeching future and the haunting past, a medal says: Let’s pay homage to today.

And the simple act of paying homage may be the most important thing of all. For not only do we not honor excellence in our daily lives, we don’t honor anything. We have no rituals that allow us to salute our fellow humans. That’s why the humility we feel during a medal ceremony is rarer than gold. Watching the athletes stand on the podium, we throw away the dross and carping chatter of our minds, quieting ourselves to a state of reverence — you could almost say of love. It is the way a parent feels about his or her child. And sometimes, watching the happiness on the faces of the athletes on the medal stands, men and women of all colors, nationalities and backgrounds, it’s impossible to resist the heart-quickening thought that they are all — that we are all — children of one family.

Most of those who stand on the podium feel something like this, too. At least, they feel that the moment is larger than them, as it is larger than those of us watching, and it is lovely and poignant and funny to watch them trying to come to terms with that fact.

At the Olympic Stadium Wednesday night, three faces stood out on the victory stand. I remember them because the moment seemed to strip each of them to who they were, all the way down — so that 100,000 people looking at the huge screen in the stadium, and millions more around the world, could see something on their faces that only their parents, or lovers, had ever seen.

The first face was that of Kazakhstan hurdler Olga Shishigina, who won the 100-meter hurdles. On the track she looked tough and dauntless, but on the stand a completely different person emerged. Shishigina had the deepest, most soulful eyes, like those of a little girl waiting to take first communion. The poetry of the moment did not escape her: It seemed to float above her, and she was content to shyly watch it, like a timid forest creature or a saint to whom a blessed vision had appeared.

Then there was Germany’s Nils Schumann, who won the 800 meters in a split-second upset over the great Danish runner Wilson Kipketer. Schumann seemed overwhelmed by what he had done, and as he stood on the stand, he kept rubbing the bridge of his nose, with an expression on his face that looked almost sad. Maybe some emotions are so great that they take the form of their opposites.

And finally, there was American hurdler Angelo Taylor, who won the 400-meter hurdles. Under his cornrows Taylor had the sweetest, most innocent face, and as he stood waiting to receive his medal, constantly changing expressions of naive wonder and childlike surprise and utter joy flitted across it. After the ceremony he fumbled to pose correctly with the other runners, a young man who found himself suddenly on the biggest stage in the world and didn’t know quite what to do. He was every American’s kid, and we were as proud of his innocence and his confusion and his decency as we were of his feat on the track. I was, anyway.

And the American national anthem played, and we all stood in respect, as we do for every anthem. Angelo Taylor stood there. And looking at his shining face, I remembered a line from Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”: “I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside of them.”

The South Korean city of Pyeongchang was awarded the 2018 Winter Olympics on Wednesday after failing in two previous attempts.

Pyeongchang defeated rivals Munich and Annecy, France, in the first round of a secret ballot of the International Olympic Committee.

Needing 48 votes for victory, Pyeongchang received 63 of the 95 votes cast. Munich received 25 and Annecy seven.

The Koreans had lost narrowly in previous bids for the 2010 and 2014 Olympics.

Pyeongchang will be the first city in Asia outside Japan to host the Winter Games. Japan held the games in Sapporo in 1972 and Nagano in 1998.

Olympic gold-medalist Lindsey Vonn has recreated that scene from “Basic Instinct” on the cover of ESPN magazine. And by “that scene” I do mean the one in which Sharon Stone infamously flashed her naughty bits to the world. It’s the magazine’s movie issue — why ESPN has a movie issue, I do not know — and it boasts a bunch of athletes reproducing classic film scenes. The headline accompanying the saucy cover photo is, wait for it, “Back to Basics.” Funny, I thought the magazine’s Body Issue — which came out just a few months ago and features exquisitely athletic naked bodies — was a return to “basics.” But it doesn’t get any more basic, or base, than paying homage to the most famous crotch shot in cinematic history.

London Olympic organizers say a record 5,000 doping tests will be carried out at the 2012 Games.

The local organizing committee has signed a memorandum of understanding with Britain’s anti-doping body and will implement the testing program under the authority of the International Olympic Committee.

London 2012 director of sport Debbie Jevans says the size of the testing program will give a “strong message that drug cheats are not welcome at the London Games.”

UK Anti-Doping will train anti-doping officials and assist them during the event to carry out a 10 percent increase on the 4,500 tests conducted at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

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Canada’s women’s hockey team has scored quite the controversy by daring to celebrate their win against the U.S. on Thursday by sipping beer, guzzling champagne and smoking cigars on the ice. After the fans filtered out of the stadium, the ladies returned to the rink still in uniform with gold medals draped around their necks. They laid on the ice, poured champagne in each other’s mouths and soaked up the Olympic glory. Their revelry hardly would have garnered any attention, except for one minor detail: there was an Associated Press photographer on hand to capture it all on film.