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Over the years I've covered 11 Olympic Games on four different continents. Here's a list — A to Z — of some of the people and some of the moments I remember best.

A — Automatic Weapon: At the Calgary Olympics, a janitor who lived on a deserted road outside the city told me of strange goings-on at his neighbor's farm. It had to do with East German bobsledders and the sabotaging of various teams' sleds. I drove there, but when I lingered near three tarp-covered crates by the barn, a burly guy in an East German sweatsuit appeared — an undercover Stasi agent — waved his AK-47 and growled "You go ... now." And I did.

B — Bull Fight: After watching 18-year-old matador sensation Jesulin de Ubrique put on a show at Barcelona's Plaza de Toros, I went with the draft horses that pulled the dispatched bull to Antonio, the arena butcher, and wrote of him, too. Our editor, Max Jennings, responded: "Good story, but Hemingway's 'Death in the Afternoon' was easier to stomach."

C — Cab Driver: Rushing to get out of a taxi near the Nagano press center, I left my Minolta on the floor. I figured the camera was gone, but 45 minutes later the shaken driver showed up and hand-delivered it and a lesson on Japanese people. I tried to thank him, but the interpreter said: "He's embarrassed. He let you down. It was his job to care for you and he failed."

D — Disappearing Deer: Leaving a local tavern near midnight, my buddy and I met Ellen Kolberg as we tromped through the snow down Storgata, the narrow main street of Lillehammer. When she mentioned a reindeer in her garage, we coaxed her to take us there. Down an alley, behind a snow embankment, we came upon the half-open door. Peering into the darkness, sure enough, we saw a big eye ... a large velvety antler ... then rising from its haunches, a full-grown white reindeer.

The next evening I giddily led four skeptical guys to the garage. I'd brought a flashlight, but my beam found only an empty shed and my pals' barbs: "So who had the red nose, you or your reindeer?"

E — Edwin Moses: More than any athlete, the Fairview High hurdler put Dayton on the Olympic map. After winning gold in the 400 hurdles in 1976 and 1984, he took bronze in Seoul, then sat and talked about home and how his education-minded mom had made him read 25 books each summer.

F — Fabio DiGilio: About 2 a.m. one night, the enthusiastic Torino waiter at the Vico Equesense restaurant made a sweeping motion over the dining crowd — Russians, Canadians, Norwegians, French, Australians, Americans, neighborhood Italians and the reserved Japanese gold medal figure skater, Shizuka Arakawa — patted me on the back and said: "Tomas, my friend, in a few days I will be sad because all of you will be gone. But right now this is beautiful. The whole world is sitting here with me and everyone is having a great time. That's the Olympics, is it not?"

G — Joe Greene: I'll never forget the Stebbins High grad — initially overshadowed by fellow long jumpers Carl Lewis and Mike Powell — stopping as he marked off his steps before his first jump in Barcelona, grinning up at the crowd of 63,000 and waving for everyone to begin clapping in unison. With the entire stadium urging him on, he won the bronze medal, then won bronze in Atlanta, too.

H — Hockey girl: Piqua High's Kristin King didn't just skate for the U.S. women's team in Torino, she competed in the memory of her mother, Mary Ellen, who, before dying of cancer, had driven her to rinks as far off as Detroit so her daughter could follow her dream.

I — Interpreter: At the Albertville Games, famed skier Jean Claude Killy told me to visit Val d'Isere, his hometown high in the French Alps, and meet Father Marcel Charvin. I did, but the old priest spoke no English. That's when I walked into a nearby pub and offered $50 to anyone who could interpret. A bleary-eyed guy soon had Charvin telling me how the Germans marched into town in World War II and demanded 2,000 cows. He said it would take two days to round up the stock. Instead, the French Resistance set up an ambush and after Charvin's good-luck Mass, the Germans were lured through the mountain pass leading to the altar ... and routed.

J — Eric Johnson and Lynn Smith: The former Yellow Springs High athletes and longtime pals were seriously injured in the Centennial Park bombing at the Atlanta Games. Although Olympic organizers kept the media at bay, I regularly slipped into Grady Memorial Hospital and wrote several stories from their bedsides.

K — Kangaroos: After the Sydney Games, a 1,000-mile flight in an old prop plane got me to Broken Hill in the Outback, where one evening outdoorsman Darrell Ford took me to a rocky outcrop outside of town. He tossed out bread slices, and out of the gloaming a couple of dozen figures soon appeared. They were wild hill kangaroos. There were mischievous youngsters — "larrikans," Darrell called them — who stood on hind legs and boxed. There were mothers with joeys in their pouches and, finally, there was a big, powerfully built male, who began following a female everywhere. "It's mating season," Darrell whispered. "He'll follow that sheila every place — just like blokes in the pubs."

L — Lucinda Adams: The longtime Dayton educator and 1960 Olympic gold medalist in the 400-meter relay grew up poor in segregated Bloomingdale, outside Savannah, Ga. She wasn't permitted to go to the white school where her parents were custodians, but as she helped them clean there, she'd salvaged her own school supplies from the trash. Savannah hosted sailing at the Atlanta Games and had its own opening parade, which was led by the tearful Adams, who — in a hero's welcome — was cheered by thousands.

M — Monkeys: Trekking a few miles on a narrow trail through a snow-coated evergreen forest beyond the Kanbayashi Snowboard Park in Nagano, I stumbled onto a scene straight out of "Planet of the Apes." Gathered around a hot spring were over 100 red-faced, silver-haired snow monkeys. Some frolicked in the whiteness, others traversed the rocky precipices above, and then there were those who soaked drowsily in the steaming water, only their heads showing in a scene reminiscent of a Russian bath house in winter.

N — Nigerian hurdler Glory Alozie: Her fiance was killed by a car in Sydney before the Games began. For days, the grieving hurdler refused to leave her room or eat. Her coaches figured she would not compete, but she showed up at Olympic Stadium and ran through her tears to a silver medal in the 100-meter hurdles. The other runners then led her on a lap around the track as 110,000 fans gave her a standing ovation.

O — Olympia: During the 2004 Games, I went to the town of Olympia, 31/2 hours southwest of Athens. That's where the ancient Olympic Games first were contested 2,800 years earlier. It's the place where Theagenes won the Olympic boxing competition in 480 B.C. and, later, the brutal pankration, where finger breaking, low blows and strangulation was allowed. His hometown of Thasos put up a statue in his honor, but the tribute so tormented a luckless rival that the guy went there and attacked the statue, only to have it topple over and kill him — another Theagenes' victory over him.

P — Puppies: In Seoul, I was walking down a side street near a market one morning and saw a woman pushing a shopping cart full of cute little puppies. Shoppers would come up, point to an animal and she'd twist its neck, wrap the limp body in newspaper and hand it over for dinner.

Q — Ana Fidelia Quirot: With the shortage of soap and bleach in Cuba, people wash clothes in a mixture of isopropyl alcohol and water heated in a pot atop a stove. That's what the iconic Cuban half-miler was doing that 1993 day when there was an explosion. She suffered third-degree burns over half her body and lost the baby she carried. With neck, arms and chest wrapped in bandages to avoid the tropical sun, she began training again, then showed up in Atlanta and won silver in the 800.

R — Robina Muqimyar and Friba Razayee: They were the first two female Olympians from Afghanistan and I remember Robina — the teenage sprinter who'd been threatened by village elders for stepping out from beneath the burqa — telling a few of us in Athens: "This is important. Afghan women will know they can do anything if there is hope in the heart." Four years later, with Taliban oppression again on the rise, both athletes have gone underground and 19-year-old middle distance runner Mehoboda Ahdyar, once bound for China, has disappeared.

S — Stuffed Man: In Banyoles, the small Catalan village northeast of Barcelona that hosted Olympic rowing, I stepped into the Darder Museum of Natural History and one of the biggest debates of the Games. Standing in a glass case was Exhibit No. 47 — "Africa del Sud - Boixima del Kalahari" — a 5-foot African tribesman who was stuffed, mounted and put on display like the bears and birds.

The International Olympic Committee called the display racist and asked museum officials to remove it. When the request was denied, Olympic teams told their athletes to avoid the place. Few did and that's where an Australian rower took one look and said to me: "Gruesome taste ... Wouldn't you say, mate?" I nodded as the tribesman stared silently through the glass at us.

T — Tonja Buford-Bailey: The Meadowdale High grad and three-time Olympian won bronze in the 400-meter hurdles in Atlanta and promptly saluted her mother, Georgianna, who raised six kids on her own in Dayton, had them work jobs growing up and saw to it they all got to college.

U — Underwear: When my bags were lost my first week in Athens, I went to a nearby shop to buy undershorts. The largest they had would have fit me in junior high, but I still bought a dozen pair. I thought they served me well in Greece, but to this day my wife begs me not to wear them. Think Homer Simpson in a thong.

V — Vonny: That's the family nickname for LaVonna Martin Floreal, the Trotwood-Madison grad who was a two-time Olympian and won silver in the 100-meter hurdles at Barcelona. Today, she and Tonja Buford-Bailey reign as the greatest women Olympians Dayton has produced.

W — Laurie Walters: While in Nagano, I took a sleek bullet train to a school in the town of Saku in the shadow of the Mt. Asama volcano. That's where the free-spirited Carroll High grad worked in a government-sponsored program that exposed students to native English speakers so they learned speech patterns and culture. "I'm kind of like a walkin' talkin' dictionary," Laurie said, "but I don't always go by the book."

To that point, she'd even joined the local taiko drum corps, a troupe that usually allowed only men to perform.

"Please say 'Hello' to her parents in a most hearty way," Iwao Namiki, another teacher, said to me. "We like her very much. We really have never met anyone quite like her."

X — X Games: That's where snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler — a product of Oakwood's Harman Elementary — first made her name before jumping to the Torino Olympics, winning silver in the half-pipe, then appearing on several magazine covers, becoming a YouTube sensation and ending up one of the most popular Winter Olympic faces ever of the U.S.

Y — "You got change for phone?" That's what the guy asked me as I spoke on an adjoining pay phone on Las Ramblas, the tree-lined Barcelona promenade that hosts a circus of artists, panhandlers, fortune tellers and finch sellers among the old churches, flower vendors and outdoor cafes. As I kept talking — to my folks back in Ohio — the guy suddenly punched me in the chest. The leather bag under my arm — which foolishly held most of my money, my camera and plane ticket — fell to the ground and instantly some other guy grabbed it and took off like Carl Lewis. I tackled the one who hit me. A nasty scrap ensued, but I held on until the cops came.

My assailant — an Algerian thug — went to jail and that evening, I stopped at Casa Leopoldo, a restaurant where I'd eaten regularly. The woman there saw my bruised face and wanted details. After I told her, she said sadly: "This is not Barcelona. He wasn't one of us. It's not who we are."

Soon she had a solution: I would eat for free every night at her restaurant. Breakfast at another place would be gratis, as would drinks at a neighborhood tavern. Face to face with the worst in humanity, I'd found the very best.

Z — Zenko-ji Temple: I went to the fabled Seventh Century Temple in Nagano with its smoking caldrons and hidden bronze statue of Buddha — considered so powerful that for fear of going blind, no one has been allowed to lay eyes on it for 300 years. I arrived for the sunrise procession of elaborately robed Buddhist monks and the revered high priest going to morning prayers. I dropped to my knees and, unexpectedly, the high priest touched the top of my head with a strand of his rosary-like juzu beads. Afterward a white-bearded old man whispered in Japanese: "A blessing here brings eternal salvations. ... You are very lucky."

And he was right. For me, Zenko-ji — and so many other Olympic memories — have made me feel very lucky.

As for salvation, well, there was that Greek underwear when I needed it.