A child plays with a mock submachine gun at a model Mass Transit Railway (MTR) station to mark the National Security Education Day at Hong Kong Police College in Hong Kong, China on April 15, 2021. The “education day” was organized to promote the sweeping legislation China imposed last year, marked with school activities, games and shows, and a parade by police and other services. (Photo by Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

Russian Olympic Committee's goaltender Mariia Sorokina (foreground L) and teammate Veronika Korzhakova (foreground R) attempt to stop a shot by Switzerland's Phoebe Staenz (R) during the women's preliminary round group A match of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games ice hockey competition between players of Russia's Olympic Committee and Switzerland, at the National Indoor Stadium in Beijing on February 4, 2022. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Reuters)

Hirunika Premachandra, a politician and a leader of Samagi Vanitha Balawegaya, a part of the main opposition party Samagi Jana Balawegaya, hugs a female police member during a protest near Sri Lanka's Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's private residence, amid the country's economic crisis, in Colombo, Sri Lanka on June 22, 2022. (Photo by Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters)

Vendor Yegor Dyachkovsky, 45, poses for a picture at an open-air market on a frosty day in Yakutsk, Russia, January 15, 2023. Yakutsk, one of the Russia's north-most cities, is hit by an extreme cold snap as the air temperature on Sunday (January 15) plunged as low as minus 51 degrees Celsius (minus 59.8 degrees Fahrenheit). (Photo by Roman Kutukov/Reuters)

David Pariken 46, of the indigenous Maasai community, roasts meat at the inaugural Maa Cultural Week dubbed The Maa-Festival aimed to promote peace, tourism, and cultural exchange as the wildebeests (Connochaetes taurinus) make their annual cross border migration at the Sekenani village, in the Maasai Mara National Reserve, in Narok County, Kenya on August 22, 2023. (Photo by Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)

Tourists take photographs with a statue of Shakira at the Malecon in Barranquilla, Colombia, on December 26, 2023. Arms interlocked high, belly exposed, and torso folded to one side anticipate Shakira's iconic hip movement, immortalized on Tuesday in a 6.5-meter-high statue in the Colombian port city of Barranquilla, where she grew up. (Photo by Carlos Parra Rios/Reuters)

A member of Sisters of the Valley, a non-religious international group founded in 2014 which has pledged to spread the gospel of the healing powers of cannabis, who uses the moniker “Sister Bernardet” online and asked not to give her name for fear of reprisal, smokes a joint at the Sisters of the Valley's farm on the outskirts of a village in central Mexico on September 3, 2023. (Photo by Raquel Cunha/Reuters)

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)