As surely nearly everyone reading this knows, the Olympics are back on after a year-long delay due to the ongoing pandemic. And the many, many people who have argued that the games should’ve been cancelled because of COVID have a pretty solid case, if I’m being completely honest. The best I can tell is that the games went on largely because of the financial loss that Tokyo and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would lose, let alone all of the national broadcasters and corporate sponsors, if the games had ended up being called off. Marketplace’s report on the costs related to holding the games placed the estimated cost of the current Olympiad in Tokyo “at around $35 billion,” a figure substantially higher than the most recent Summer Olympics five years ago in Rio ($13 billion).

Still, while I can’t help but agree with the naysayers, that bringing the globe’s top athletes to one city, the capital of a country with very low COVID vaccination rates, was a bad idea all around, I’m still enamored with the games like I am every time that they occur. The first Olympics that I can remember, the one that caught my attention and never gave up, was Sydney 2000. As a young seven year-old living on the edge of Kansas City, I loved everything about the Olympics, from the amazing opening ceremony, to how clean the facilities looked, to the gobsmacking talent of the athletes themselves, the ones who make the Olympics the spectacle they are every time around. That year I can particularly remember the diving events more than anything else; diving remains one of my favorite Summer Olympic sports because of it.

By the time the Winter Olympics came around in 2002, hosted by Salt Lake City, I was excited to see the circus begin all over again. Only this time, it’d be in my own country, albeit a good two-days drive west of home. At about the same time as the Salt Lake games, I even enrolled in a local fencing school, thinking that maybe someday I might even make it up to that stage of competition. My days in the saber competitions were fairly brief, though recently I’ve wondered if maybe the foil would’ve been a better fit for me. It’s been interesting watching each Olympiad in the intervening decades: as a child I got to look up to the Olympians of the Sydney, Salt Lake, Athens, Turin, Beijing, and Vancouver games, while by the time London came around in 2012, I suddenly found myself the same age as most of the athletes.

In the years since, with Sochi, Rio, Pyeongchang, and now Tokyo, I’ve found an even greater appreciation for the Olympics watching as an adult. I don’t really expect I’ll ever end up competing in any Olympic event, at 28 I’m likely past my prime in most categories, but I still enjoy sitting back and watching hours of competition each evening, and being awestruck at the skill of these top athletes in their respective sports.

If anything, I really hope the IOC can figure out the big issues wracking the games, from the corruption, to the high cost of hosting, to issues of doping scandals, and return these games to being purely 16 days focused on the individual athletes and their talents. Any global sporting event is going to be a massive revenue source for broadcasters and corporate sponsors, so while I may raise an eyebrow every time one of the athletes from my country comes on the screen talking about their favorite sandwich from Subway, I usually dismiss it as just something they’ve got to do to be able to afford to compete at this level.

Proposals have been made in the last couple of years to have permanent Olympic host cities, say a rotating set of cities that could take turns hosting the games. Dr. Dave Amos, an Assistant Professor in the Department of City & Regional Planning at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA made a pretty good argument for this in 2018 on his excellent urban planning YouTube channel City Beautiful.

In his video, Amos argues that there should be 6 cities designated permanent hosts of the Games, with the Summer and Winter Olympics rotating between those 6. For the Winter Games they are Calgary, Turin, and Pyeongchang, while for the Summer Games they are Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, and Sydney. Honestly, the argument makes a lot of sense, and would be a good solution to the problem of cost and how useful Olympic venues become following their run in the spotlight, as those six cities’ venues would be reused every few years.

I like the idea, though one of the big draws for me every time is getting to see the events in a different city. I’m loving the opportunity to learn a bit more about Tokyo and Japan in general this time around, just as I found myself reading quite a bit more about Pyeongchang and South Korea three years ago during the last Winter Olympics. I’m hoping, for example, to be able to be in LA during the 2028 Summer Olympics, I’d love at least once to see the games in person, to not only immerse myself in the Olympics as I can watching them on TV, but to be there in person surrounded by the whole experience. I imagine it’s similar to going to an F1 race instead of just watching it on TV. The race itself is better on TV, honestly, but the fan experience alone is worth the trip.

Still, if the IOC ends up choosing a permanent host city, or a set of permanent host cities, I’ll be excited to see who they choose, and will undoubtedly begin daydreaming about making the trip out to see the Olympics in person there someday. For now though, I’m content to sit in front of the TV and spend an evening watching the events in Tokyo from afar.