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: stars into bendable action figures? Just as in baseball, when athletes overnight began looking more like Humvees than the reliable mid-size family Chevy, one’s eye registers a difference that defies any easy effort to comprehend.

It was the art historian Anne Hollander who noted that, even naked, the body is subject to fashion and that the body beautiful differs according to an era’s prevailing mores and tastes. Because the Greek word gymnasium translates as something more or less like “nuditorium,” it seems clear that few events offer a richer opportunity to see how physical beauty is currently constructed than the Beijing Games.

None of this is to suggest that the Olympic ideals have been forever lost. Even in the classical world, the range of forms at the Games was broad enough to encompass lean bodies suited to running, wiry wrestlers with bantam bodies, refrigerator-size hulks capable of feats like lifting a young ox.

However distorted, the belief that to be fit is not merely to be brimming with sexual aliveness, but also to be prepared for hardship and battle, to be pure and good, remains deeply enmeshed in every Olympiad.

Goony for athletic beauty, Socrates managed to find in all that young flesh not only a delight to the eyes, but also food for the soul.

In many ways, the marketers of the Summer Olympics are still mining Socratic ideals, even if purity in sports at this point is surely a fantasy. At least that is the impression one obsessive has taken away from the Games thus far, as the shape of human perfection continues to evolve.