Roundtable: Best and worst Olympic moments, and what we're most looking forward to in Rio

Being in the capital during London 2012. It was not Super Saturday or Britain’s glut of gold medals that made our Games great. It was the way cynicism melted away as Britain realised that hosting the Olympics was an extraordinary privilege and joy, that the eyes of the world were on us and we were actually doing rather a good job. Strangers spoke on the Tube, visitors came from across the globe, and for a few weeks London was a friendlier, happier, more open place.

Ben Johnson’s positive drugs test in 1988 remains a watershed moment in sport. We now know Johnson was far from the only one, but the shock of a thrilling victory achieved by cheating ended my sporting innocence and taught us never to buy fully into any apparent sporting miracle. Cheers, Ben.

Sheer immersion in sport – for two weeks every four years we can become experts on sports we’d never normally think of watching. We’ll marvel at Tom Daley’s splash-free entry, pore over the finer points of the asymmetric bars and rage at the incompetence of the taekwondo judges. It’s all brilliant and it all matters hugely. Even the horse dancing.

GB’s 4x100m triumph in Athens 2004. “Mark Lewis-Francis has a chance of glory here… Maurice Greene is coming…” The immortal words of Steve Cram as Great Britain’s unfancied quartet stunned the Americans to snatch gold in Athens. Sure, their rivals bottled their second changeover, but it made for the most thrilling of conclusions as, for once, GB didn’t misplace the baton when it mattered. A Games-defining moment.

Paula Radcliffe dropping out of the marathon An aspiring distance runner at the time, I tuned into the marathon in Athens hoping (and expecting) Paul Radcliffe to stride to glory. Instead, she dropped out just four miles from the finish. If you’re at an Olympics, you should finish unless it’s completely impossible. Crawl before quitting. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.

Super Saturday II. Jessica Ennis-Hill, Mo Farah and Greg Rutherford are back, folks, hoping to create a sequel to that extraordinary night four years ago. Chuck in the women’s team pursuit and plenty of rowing medals on offer, and it could be another golden day for Team GB.

Seeing Usain Bolt explode onto the scene in 2008 was a thrill I can recall very vividly indeed. The shock as he eased up yards before the finish line left everyone I was watching it with utterly flabbergasted and the intrigue over what time he could have recorded that day will always be fiercely debated. After years of watching huge sprinters power their way home, it was gloriously refreshing to see a star with a totally different physique and stature bound to glory. To smash the world record with a time of 9.69 seconds was astounding, but also the way he posed and openly had fun before the start of the race was radically different from what had preceded it from the top stars. The 200m was an equally emphatic victory and a global superstar was born in a matter of seconds.

Having been stunned by the incredible achievement of Jonathan Edwards smashing the triple jump world record with both of his first two jumps at the 1995 World Championships in Gothenburg, I was looking forward to him crowning that feat with Olympic gold a year later in Atlanta. Edwards was the overwhelming favourite for the event and was expected to perhaps even further his world record, but American Kenny Harrison somehow managed to pip the Brit with a jump of 18.09m. Edwards had to settle for silver after the longest ever jump not to win gold, 17.88m, and, although he went on to claim gold at Sydney four years later, it was an enormous disappointment to see him come up short in the event he was so dominant in at the time.

Can Usain Bolt achieve the ‘triple triple’? The 29-year-old exclusively told Eurosport earlier this year that “to win the triple triple would be my greatest achievement” and to me it would represent the most incredible feat in the sport. No athlete has managed to dominate on the track to this extent over three consecutive Games and if he can triumph in the trio of events once more on the biggest stage, there will be no doubt that we have witnessed the greatest athlete of all time. Given that this will be Bolt’s last Olympic Games, his pursuit of the ‘triple triple’ will rightly dominate in Rio and the world of athletics – and indeed the world of sport - will be desperate to see him bring his Olympic career to a remarkable and glorious conclusion.

The gasp was almost as memorable as the gold. When Usain Bolt strode into Olympic folklore at the 2008 Games in Beijing, he did so by achieving a time that many would have deemed impossible for a human being to cover only a decade earlier. So much for dipping under 10 seconds.

At 9.69 seconds, there seemed to be enough time for Bolt to take a selfie of his rivals while he waltzed over the line. It had never been seen before in the history of the Games. Of course, the record was bettered when the lithe Jamaican turned in 9.58 at the World Championship in Berlin a year later, but this was more special because it came first. It was the first time Bolt had exploded onto the global stage. His gallop was glorious because it was run at the Olympics.

China’s decision to use a child stunt dummy to sing the country’s favourite tune Ode to the Motherland at the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games. Lin Miaoke was the face of the opening ceremony, but it turned out she was lip syncing, Yang Peiyi was the seven-year-old voice heard by billions. A fairly despicable and barmy act by China that they should never be allowed to forget.

Usain Bolt breaking his world record time of 9.58 seconds. Too much to hope for? Perhaps. But we can always dream.

Mo Farah’s 10,000m win on Super Saturday, 2012. There are certain moments in sport – and in life in general – that are so incredible, you will always remember where you were. One of these for me was during the climax of one of the greatest days in Britain’s sporting history, when Mo Farah won 10,000m gold on an incredible final lap in 2012. I was at on platform at West Hampstead train station, stranded on the way to a party, crowding round the tiny phone of a stranger who had managed to get a stream of the race. When he won we all screamed in delight, filling the station with noise for a brief few seconds. Amazing how a country can come together.

Linford Christie, 1988 100m final. One of my earliest memories is watching this final, willing, expecting, Christie to win, then feeling such crushing disappointment when he was beaten, by some distance, as Ben Johnson ran clear of the field. To find out a short while afterwards that the Canadian was on drugs merely added to the anger. My first experience of cheating on such an epic scale.

Bolt – miracle man or mortal? It was so close against Justin Gatlin in the World Championships last year, just one-hundredth of a second split them - but Bolt proved himself yet again. Of course you’d be a fool to bet against the Jamaican but has he gone for one too many? If he wins his third 100m title he will surely be the greatest Olympian. But if not, it will be such an anti-climax to an incredible career – and not the way he, or his legion of fans, would want him to bow out.

It’s tough to know where to start with this – most of my favourite sporting memories of all time come from the Olympics. The incredible orgy of British gold medals at London 2012? Miniature rowing cox Garry Herbert blubbing his eyes out after winning gold with the Searle brothers at Barcelona in 1992? So many to choose from… It would certainly have been getting woken up by my dad at 3am to watch Ben Johnson win the men’s 100m final at Seoul in 1988, if it that memory hadn’t been soured just a few days later by the drug revelations that followed. So instead I’ll go for what is probably my earliest childhood sporting memory: watching Daley Thompson win decathlon gold at Los Angeles in 1984… and specifically the backflip he pulled off after nailing his pole vault on a brilliant sunny afternoon that made South London seem like Southern California.

Pretty much the whole of Atlanta ’96, a Games which sadly I remember more for a lunatic planting a nail bomb than anything else. Only Michael Johnson’s amazing 200m-400m double got me out of my chair that year, as so many red-hot Team GB favourites came up short.

Normally it’s the sense of discovery in little-known sports that I love the most – those moments when you find yourself screaming at the TV while watching modern pentathlon, pommel horse or archery – but this time around it’s something more specific: the women’s heptathlon has all the ingredients to be one of the all-time great Olympic battles, with an epic battle sure to explode between JEH, KJT and BTE (aka Jess Ennis-Hill, Katarina Johnson-Thompson and Brianne Theisen-Easton).

Super Saturday. Six gold medals in one heady summer’s day, building to a glorious crescendo in the Olympic Stadium as Jessica Ennis, Greg Rutherford and Mo Farah electrified the country. Everything seemed to come together on that day: the wonderful party London was hosting, the realisation of years of hard work for the athletes involved and, with an immigrant from Somalia, a mixed race girl from Sheffield and a ginger from Milton Keynes uniting in glory, the happy story the country liked to tell itself about integration and diversity. How quaint it looks now.

This actually came seven years after the Olympics in question. Marion Jones was the star of Sydney in 2000, becoming the first woman to win five medals in one Games: golds in the 100m, 200m and 4x400m, as well as bronze in the long jump and 4x100m. By 2007 she had been stripped of all five after being exposed as a huge drugs cheat during the Balco scandal. By 2008 she was in jail for lying to investigators. The golden girl was behind bars and athletics’ integrity was besmirched again.

The stories. Whether it’s Michael Phelps adding to his 22 medals, Usain Bolt going for the treble-treble or Jessica Ennis-Hill defending her title, the sight of sporting excellence is something you can never tire of. But the Olympics has other elements too: the tales of merely competing against the odds, nations breaking new ground and, with cases like Eric the Eel, moments to lift your hearts.