David Wallechinsky is so sure of every fact to do with the Olympics that you don’t want to shatter the illusion. Waiting patiently at the appointed place, he tells you, why were you walking in the wrong direction — I saw you and wondered, why is she going the other way?

That was not you. But you do not tell him that he’s wrong. That possibility does not exist.

Wallechinsky’s The Complete Book of the Olympics, updated every four years, is possibly the most essential part of a Games reporter’s work-kit. At the media centre, they refer to it for perspective. They beg and borrow their neighbour’s copy to check facts. And to find moments of meditational calm amid thousands of journalists working 24/7 between them, they read once again the favourite stories that make the Olympics the most special sports event.

Smitten by the Olympics at the age of 12 when his father took him for the opening ceremony of the Rome Olympics, Wallechinsky’s interest was reignited in 1984 when the Games came to his hometown, Los Angeles. “I wanted to read a book about Olympics results and stories,” he says. “It didn’t exist. So I thought, I’ll write it.” before national Olympic committees archived their records systematically, he went from library to NOC office to university with personal collections of athletes. “We photocopied everything.”

So, when India marks its absence in an Olympics celebrating a century of field hockey, his book has mention of an incident in the Indian dressing room in the 1936 Berlin Olympics: “As a British colony, India was forced to march behind the flag of Great Britain. But in the dressing room before their final match against Germany, the Indian saluted the tricolour flag of the Indian National Congress.” India won 8-1, with Dhyan Chand taking six barefooted.

... contd.