The Games of the XXIX Olympiad will open in Beijing on Friday, amid pomp, pageantry and eloquence. They will also open amid a virtual cloud of controversy surrounding the host nation’s human rights record, not to mention the very literal cloud of smog and pollutants for which Beijing is nearly as famous for as the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.

While China’s record of humanity and environmental sensitivity may not be exactly stellar, it is now time for the world to move past that. We will now be privileged bystanders, from thousands of miles away, to 17 days of some of the finest athletic competition the world has to offer. For those 17 days the world at least makes a pretense of peaceful cooperation and cohesiveness. Thankfully, past are the days when Russia-U.S. hockey matches or Russia-Hungary water polo matches carried all the heady impetus of the Cold War on their shoulders.

That’s not to say that the world is without issues of at least equal importance today. Just ask people in Darfur, Iraq or even parts of China, as evidenced by events in Xinjiang and Tibet in far western China.

The Olympics aren’t about all that, though.

The story of the Olympics is about humanity’s triumph over adversity, over nature and even over itself. The great stories of the Olympics rarely involve the politics that surround them.

They involve people – a 16-year-old from Iowa, a single pair of athletes from long-ravaged Somalia or the trio from tiny Tuvalu, a nation participating in its first Olympics. The Olympics have a way of making legends out of some of those people for exhibiting the greatest traits that mortal humans can hope to emulate.

Let us take some time, watch the Olympics and take a mental break from all of the strife, the terror and the things that are wrong in the world – instead basking for a moment in a grand exhibition of humanity’s greatness.