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)

A sculptural artwork depicting former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and headless presidents shot by a hooded high school student (not pictured) is seen at the Contemporary Art Museum in Santiago, December 2, 2014. The artwork, part of the “El ladrillo angular” (The angular brick) exhibition, portrays a student fighting against the ongoing continuity of dictatorship because of a political and economic system which has been impossible to destroy, according to “Papas Fritas” the artwork's creator. (Photo by Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)

A Hindu holy man looks at a decoration on the ghats of the river Saryu as part of preparations for the groundbreaking ceremony of a temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Monday, August 3, 2020. As Hindus prepare to celebrate the groundbreaking of a long-awaited temple at a disputed ground in northern India, Muslims say they have no firm plans yet to build a new mosque at an alternative site they were granted to replace the one torn down by Hindu hard-liners decades ago. (Photo by Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP Photo)

A health worker administers a dose of the Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine to a worker in a local entertainment venue area where a new cluster of COVID-19 infections were found in Bangkok, Thailand, Wednesday, April 7, 2021. Officials in Thailand’s capital have ordered a two-week closure of all entertainment venues in three districts to try to limit the spread of the coronavirus from nightspots there. (Photo by Sakchai Lalit/AP Photo)

Kids play in water to cool off during the scorching weather of a heatwave at a River Landing splash park in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada July 2, 2021. (Photo by David Stobbe/Reuters)

Indian men sleep in the shadow of an overflowing cloth container of hay, to be used as animal fodder, on a truck on a hot summer day in Ajmer in the western state of Rajasthan on May 30, 2018. (Photo by Shaukat Ahmed/AFP Photo)

Undated handout photo of members of Ballet Ireland during a photocall on Edinburgh's Calton Hill before taking part in the Edinburgh Festival 2018 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Issue date: Tuesday, August 7, 2018. (Photo by Julie Howden/Culture Ireland/PA Wire)

Ground personnel tend to actress Yulia Peresild after the landing of the Soyuz MS-18 reentry capsule with herself and director Klim Shipenko of the “Vyzov” (The Challenge) film crew as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky on board, in steppes southeast of Jezkazgan, Kazakhstan on October 17, 2021. (Photo by Sergei Savostyanov/TASS)