Well, the waiting is nearly over, and there’s just 40 hours until the opening ceremony of the much-vaunted, oft-maligned 2008 Summer Olympics.

Enough has been written about the merits or not about Beijing’s hosting of the Games, and I don’t think I have anything much more to contribute - if you’re looking for slightly more political commentary, I suggest you have a look at Stephen Boyle’s consistently brilliant blog.

What I’m more interested in, as one hopes everyone should be in the run-up to the world’s biggest sporting occasion, is the Games themselves. Occasions like the Olympics are ones which anyone who has the chance should fully indulge - and I don’t just mean where you read the coverage every day and watch the TV highlights, I mean the whole thing. A friend of mine is planning on leaving another’s birthday party early this Saturday night, because at point she’ll be “on Beijing time”, and will be leaving to make sure she doesn’t miss Pauline Curley in the Women’s Marathon - finishing at about 1.30am Irish time on Sunday morning, or Derval O’Rourke’s 100m heat at 11am.

Sad as that may sound, would that I could do the same, but alas my working life simply doesn’t allow for it. Tournaments like the Olympics, or the FIFA World Cup, demand that kind of devotion - they simply don’t come around often enough not to give it your every waking moment of attention.

WIth that in mind, I present to the world my 10 Favourite Olympic Moments. With any luck, Beijing will provide another fleet of memories to add to it.

10. - Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10s
Montreal, 1976

I suppose it’s easy to start with a classic, but the sheer measure of Comaneci’s unforgettable gymnastic feats in Montreal really cannot be understated. Think for a moment what the sporting landscape would be like if a sport where errors were more blatant, like diving, had never experienced true perfection - if every dive was fumbled, every splash errant, every impact blunt. Then imagine someone coming along and diving with consumate perfection, and everything was just perfect.

Quite simply, Comaneci brought the sport to a new level. She did to gymnastics what Tiger Woods did to golf, what Sampras and Federer did to tennis, and what Schumacher did to Formula 1. She upgraded it.

9. Michelle Smith’s three gold medals
Atlanta, 1996

Let’s forget the infamous dodgy whiskey that came later in life and think of the actual occasion. Here was a 26-year-old woman, whose career was on the up after a successful European Championships the following year, and her stock was rising as she came up against the failing Janet Evans and won not just one, but three Olympic gold medals. Ireland didn’t know what hit it, and Ireland didn’t know how to act - but for to be thrilled that one of our own could take on the world and win, and to keep doing it. Back in the era of O’Sullivan and Smith, Ireland was on top of the world, and irrespective of what followed in Smith’s life, Ireland had that moment in the sun.

8. Lord Clifton Wrottesley - of Ireland - nearly win’s Ireland’s first WInter medal
Salt Lake City [Winter Games], 2002

OK, hands up. Who’s ever heard of Clifton Wrottesley? Seriously. Anyone? Thought not. Yet, on an anonymous wet Wednesday in February 2002, when Ireland’s thoughts were more preoccupied with saving a few souvenir Irish banknotes, an Irishman (well, by descent, anyway) was doing what Ireland never thought any Irishman could ever do: win a medal at the Winter Olympics.

Look at the attention the Irish papers gave the story: the Independent of the day only included the story as a semi-afterthought, but an Irishman came within half a second of a gold medal, in - of all events - the skeleton. Mock it as you may, but in the grand scheme of Irish Olympians, a thought should be spared for Clifton Wrottesley - a man, with a tricolour on his chest, who nearly gave an insular sporting world an almighty shock. The Irish iceman had indeed cometh.

7. Derek Redmond’s 400m injury breakdown
Barcelona, 1992

Ciara asks for this to be included - a teary moment; Redmond had won World and European Championships as part of Great Britain’s 4×400m relay team before but had never really excelled in his personal career as injury always struck at inopportune moments. In the semi-finals of the 200m singles at Barcelona, just as it seemed Redmond had finally overcome a hamstring that had plagued him for years, it snapped at the worst possible time.

What was more memorable, though, was not the injury itself, but how Redmond reacted to it. He didn’t just make his way off - no, this was the Olympics, and Redmond was running the course. WIth the help of his father, and with debilitating pain shooting up his thigh, Redmond crossed the finish line to what could well have been the biggest cheer of the Games. A wonderful personal moment in front of the biggest crowd of all.

6. Greg Louganis’ involuntary concussion
Barcelona, 1992

So you’ve won the previous two Olympic high-dive competitions. What better way than to have a crack at your excellent treble than to provide the world’s best-known diving moment?

Though he probably didn’t want to be remembered for the first ten seconds of this…

5. Cathy Freeman keeps the Gold home
Sydney, 2000

The hopes of your nation are a weight under which most athletes buckle. Multiply this tenfold and you’re nowhere near imagining the pressure on Cathy Freeman to perform as she took the blocks for the Women’s 400m final in Sydney. The first aboriginal athlete to win major international medals, at the 1997 and 1999 World Championships, and having lit the Flame at the opening ceremony, the expectation of success was simply enormous.

Anything but first place, and Freeman would have been forever remembered by her compatriots as someone who could have done something glorious. Victory, though, would make her simply unforgettable, not just to the 110,000 who witnessed it in person, but the billions who saw the moment worldwide. Coming into the home straight, being muscled into second place, it was now or never - and Freeman’s response was a masterful, emphatic now.

4. Kelly Holmes wins at last
Athens, 2004

At 34, most athletes are well past their prime, being outclassed by competitors with younger, more supple builds. Not helping Holmes’ preparations for Athens was her deep depression triggered by a series of leg injuries, which had arisen throughout her athletic career. After issues with self-harm that ultimately led to a failed suicide attempt, Holmes ultimately managed to rise above her personal problems and finally reach a major event without any major injury problems. With a lifetime of unfulfilled ambition behind her, no more can be said but that Kelly Holmes managed to put it all right.

The BBC Commentary team, almost cheekily, suggested shortly after her 1500m that Kelly Holmes would surely have to become a Dame Commander after her epic victories. Sure enough, she received her knighthood only five months later: the highest honour her country could offer, in recognition of the greatest prize any athlete can claim, and after the toughest of all personal battles.

3. Thorpedo and Phelps square off
Athens, 2004

Chief among my memories of the last Games in Athens is the biggest clash of the titans in the tournament: Australia’s Ian Thorpe, already holder of five medals, squared off against the American hope of Michael Phelps, an emerging talent with world records under his belt and hoping to emulate Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals in one games, in the final of the Men’s 200m Freestyle. Between them was Peter van der Hoogenband of the Netherlands, yet another vastly overlooked athlete in the face of superior powers.

It was the only race in which the two would square off in solo competition, and the world wanted to know whether King Thorpedo could be toppled.

Phelps, only managing a bronze, still emerged from Athens as the Next Big Thing, taking gold in six other events, especially as Thorpe retired following the Games. Thorpe, though, could always rest safely, knowing that when push came to shove, and comparisons were drawn between the two celebrities of swimming, that there was only one winner of their titanic truel: Ian Thorpe.

2. Steve Redgrave - still winning, 16 years later
Los Angeles 1984 through Sydney 2000

The ironic thing about witnessing a moment like the Men’s Fours in Sydney 2000 is that I personally stumbled upon it completely by accident. I was in bed, and as RTE’s coverage from Sydney had ceased for the night, I was watching merely whatever the BBC coverage was happening to show. I knew nothing of Steve Redgrave, or anything that he’d done previously. All I knew of rowing was that Myles Dungan had to take time off from Rattlebag on RTÉ Radio 1 to go and do the commentary.

As it turns out, a guy named Steve Redgrave had won Olympic gold medals at every Games since Los Angeles, and was gunning to become the first man to win gold medals at an endurance sport in five consecutive Games. Only four other people in history have won gold at five Olympic meetings, but none of them have done in an endurance sport so demanding as international rowing.

My thirteen-year-old channel-hopping incarnation had gotten lucky - it was, as it turned out, quite the race. If you can find a version of this race with the original BBC TV commentary, please let me know: I’ll never forget the final words as the Italian four nearly caught Redgrave, Pincent, Foster and Cracknell at the death. “Great Britain… JUUUUUUUUUUUUUST!”, it roared.

An unforgettable sportsman, and an unforgettable ending.

1. Michael Johnson’s astonishing 19.32sec 200m World Record
Atlanta, 1996

And so we come to Number 1, and a moment that still brings me nearly to tears, I’m so awestruck seeing it, even twelve years on.

In the Summer of 1996, in between Meath’s Leinster Final and All-Ireland Semi, my family went on holiday to England, where we stayed in my aunt’s mobile home in the holiday resort of Pagham, not very far from Bognor Regis down along the south coast. It was Olympics time, and after Sonia O’Sullivan had broken our hearts pulling out of the 5,000m, and after Michelle Smith had won over all of us with her four medals in swimming, we were left to see what the rest of the world was getting itself worked up about.

Just as I did with Steve Redgrave four years later, I stumbled upon the final of the Men’s 200m by complete chance as I sat watching BBC on a portable TV. I still smile thinking of it, the broad smile that took hold of my face as I watched a man on top of his game and on top of the world. The Man With The Golden Shoes, they called him, in honour of his custom-made 85g Nikes; I simply remember him as the man who, despite the attractions of the dozens of other sports that the Olympics has to offer, showed us all how beautiful it can be simply to watch the most rudimentary of all human competitions - seeing humans get from A to B as fast as they can.

The thing about world records in sprinting is that they’re never really demolished, so much as chipped away at, with hundreths of a second being eliminated from it each time. Apparently not so with Johnson: he didn’t just beat the existing World Record (which he’d set himself at the national Olympic trials), he demolished it. He knocked a third of a second off the record, which not only still stands today, but is barely even under threat. The closest anyone has come to Johnson’s 19.32 is Tyson Gay’s 19.62 earlier this year - and there’s still a long way to go before Johnson’s record will be looking over its shoulder. Just as Johnson himself: striding magnificently onwards, getting ever closer to Point B.

It still makes me shiver watching it.

Johnson covered the opening 100m in 10.12 seconds, and the second half in 9.2 seconds flat. Even Usain Bolt’s masterful new WR of 9.72 in the 100m can’t come close to the perfection that Michael Johnson achieved for just those moments at the Olympic Stadium in Atlanta. No human has ever run just as quickly as Michael Johnson did for those 200m, and the memory of those few unforgettable, pinnacle, perfect minutes will live with me forever.

So those are my ten favourite Olympic Moments: here’s hoping that the Beijing Games can contribute some moments to make it onto this list. Now it’s over to you: what are your unforgettable Olympic moments? What did I forget? What parts of Olympic history will you always remember?

The ideals of the Olympic Games are that the world can come together and participate at common events devoid of language or ethnicity. Let’s share that spirit, and no matter what you think of their venue, let’s all enjoy the Games. There are 10,000 people there representing their countries - whichever country yours is, try just to pay attention and give them your support. After all, it is what the Olympics is all about.