This was the last gasp of amateurism at the Olympics. Most of the nations who’d already made a sham of the ideal stayed away, the Soviet-bloc boycott of the 1984 Games of Los Angeles allowing the rest of the world to gather one last time under the Games’ original ideology, unburdened by the state-sponsored automatons of Moscow and East Berlin and Prague. By 1988, those countries would be back. By ’92, everyone else — starting with the U.S. jumping in gleefully with both feet — would welcome professionals, too. But in ’84, it was still possible for an athlete to...