The Rio de Janeiro Olympics kick off on August 5 for some two weeks of competitive games drawing athletes as well as audiences from around the world. As they prepare to cover the event, Reuters photographers look back on their favourite pictures from past Olympics where they captured the action on the ground as well as the participants' tears and joy that followed. (Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Marco Antonio Eguchi of Brazil gets bucked off of Bottoms Up in the first round of the PBR Frontier Communications Iron Cowboy at AT& T Stadium on February 18, 2017 in Arlington, Texas. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

Beautician Alex Smith, 26, does the nails of Jules Aspen, 40, at the Madame Beauty salon in Chirton, North Tyneside, UK on July 13, 2020. Nail bars, beauty salons, tattoo and massage studios, physical therapy businesses, spas and piercing services are able to reopen in the latest lifting of restrictions in England. (Photo by Owen Humphreys/PA Images via Getty Images)

Gold medalist Luiza Gega of Albania celebrates after the Athletics - Women's 3000m Steeplechase Final on day 10 of the European Championships Munich 2022 at Olympiapark on August 20, 2022 in Munich, Germany. (Photo by Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters)

A traffic police woman whistles at a pedestrian, Monday, July 27, 2015, in Pyongyang, North Korea where its citizens are having a one-day national holiday to celebrate the country's 62nd anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War. (Photo by Wong Maye-E/AP Photo)

Chihuahua Cooper Babb is dressed in a costume at the 7th annual Running of the Chihuahuas event on May 3, 2014, at the First Tennessee Pavilion in Chattanooga, Tenn. (Photo by Doug Strickland/AP Photo/Chattanooga Times Free Press)

In this Friday, January 7, 2011 photo, people carry baskets of coal scavenged illegally at an open-cast mine in the village of Bokapahari in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand where a community of coal scavengers live and work. The world's biggest coal users – China, the United States and India – have boosted coal mining in 2017, in an abrupt departure from last year's record global decline for the heavily polluting fuel and a setback to efforts to rein in climate change emissions. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/AP Photo)

A young Iranian woman walks in Tehran on June 14, 2021, ahead of the June 18 presidential elections. Iran is gearing up for a presidential election on June 18 but many young people are more focussed on the daily struggle to survive and their dreams for the future. Jobs are scarce in a recession-hit economy battered by sanctions, a crisis exacerbated by the region's worst outbreak of the Covid pandemic. (Photo by Atta Kenare/AFP Photo)