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 girl plays in a water-jets fountain in Moscow, Russia, 23 June 2021. The temperature exceeded 36 degrees Celsius in Moscow. The weather in Moscow broke the temperature record high of the day, held since 1948, when meteorologists recorded +33.6. (Photo by Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA/EFE)

Border Security Force (BSF) soldiers ride their camels as they take part in a rehearsal for a road show ahead of the visit of U.S. President Donald Trump, in Ahmedabad, India, February 21, 2020. (Photo by Amit Dave/Reuters)

Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft with crew members of Expedition 59/60 Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Nick Hague lifts off from the launch pad at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, 15 March 2019. Hague, Koch, and Ovchinin will spend six-and-a-half months living and working aboard the International Space Station. (Photo by Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA/EFE)

The singing group The D-Day Darlings take part in the unveiling ceremony of a permanent war memorial, created by artist and writer Fabian Peake, at St Pancras International railway station in London, Britain, November 8, 2018. (Photo by Peter Nicholls/Reuters)

A quartet of showgirls in costume sit at an outdoor table and drink from mugs at Disneyland amusement park, Anaheim, California, 1955. (Photo by Loomis Dean/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

A woman walks past a damaged pagoda after an earthquake in Bagan, Myanmar August 25, 2016. Rescue workers surveyed the damage Thursday after a powerful earthquake shook Myanmar, killing at least four people and damaging 185 ancient Buddhist pagodas in the former capital of Bagan, a major tourist site. (Photo by Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters)

An Israeli soldier looks through her cell phone as she enjoys the Ranunculus flowers in a field in the southern Israeli Kibbutz of Nir Yitzhak, located along the Israeli- Gaza Strip border, during the Jewish holiday of Pesach (Passover) on April 12, 2017. (Photo by Menahem Kahana/AFP Photo)