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 tearful Beatle lover pleads unsuccessfully with a policeman to carry her fan button to Ringo, one of the four mop-top singers who drew squeals and shrieks from more than 30,000 spectators at two Indiana State Fair shows in Indianapolis on September 4, 1964. (Photo by Bob Daugherty/AP Photo)

In this Wednesday, April 12, 2017, photo, waitresses wait outside a restaurant in Pyongyang, North Korea. A generational divide is quietly growing in North Korea, often hidden behind relentless propaganda. On the streets there are young women in not-quite mini-skirts and teenage boys with baseball hats cocked sideways, K-pop style. (Photo by Wong Maye-E/AP Photo)

Tandem hair drying is possible with a new two-hood attachment for any electric hair dryer manufactured by Postcraft Co of Tucson, Ariz., shown in Chicago, January 27, 1965. A Y adapter permits two hoses to be attached to the dryer. (Photo by Edward Kitch/AP Photo)

A fan runs on the field during the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LV between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs at Raymond James Stadium on February 07, 2021 in Tampa, Florida. (Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

Femen activists with their bare chests reading “Fascists out of ballot boxes” are held back by Catalan regional police forces Mossos d'Esquadra as they protest against far-right Vox party candidates in Barcelona during regional elections in Catalonia on February 14, 2021. Catalonia is voting in an election overshadowed by the pandemic which Madrid hopes will unseat the region's ruling separatists more than three years after a failed bid to break away from Spain. (Photo by Lluis Gene/AFP Photo/Profimedia)

The Zammitt Family. “A portrait of the Zammitt family at their western Sydney home, with their dogs, Benji and Beau. Brian Zammitt (second from left) is the head of his booming family business, BAMS Hygiene Management, one of Australia’s leading deep cleaning companies, which specialises in disinfecting workplaces and locations contaminated with Covid-19. His wife, Sandra, and daughters Natalie and Louisa all play key frontline roles in the business”. (Photo by John Janson-Moore/Australia’s National Photographic Portrait Prize 2022)

A chimpanzee in the Osnabrück Zoo in Lower Saxony makes contact with a small zoo visitor sitting in front of a pane on September 1, 2020. The two males Lobo and Lome moved from Leipzig Zoo to Osnabrück Zoo to strengthen the social structure of the existing group. (Photo by Friso Gentsch/dpa)