To me, eclipse junkiehood is understandable, since travel is always so much more valuable if it involves some kind of quest or mission. I know, because to date I have swum at the pools used for the London (1948), Helsinki (1952) and Barcelona (1992) Olympics, and I would have swum in Tokyo's Yoyogi Stadium (1964) as well, except that I was there in the winter, when it's turned into an ice rink.

I didn't visit any of those cities in order to go swimming. But the fact is that having a slightly quirky personal agenda has enriched every journey I've ever taken. It has, among other things, taken me to different neighborhoods than I might have gone to otherwise; it has taught me strange bus routes and the word for "bathing cap" in Spanish.

These trips have broadened my perspective in other ways as well. America, and especially my home state of California, takes pride in its swimming pools, but the fact is, they pale in comparison to those of other countries. Take the outdoor pool in Helsinki, for example, where I swam early in the morning of Midsummer's Day 1996, reveling in the clean, rich beauty of a Scandinavian summer. Though this pool can be used only about two months of the year, it is still a fabulously beautiful, immaculately well-kept structure. What does this say about Scandinavians' love of the outdoors? And the Barcelona pool, like so many Spanish things, is not only lovely, but conveniently open for lap swimming -- albeit without lane lines -- until midnight.

As for London's Crystal Palace -- formerly a Victorian-era pleasure ground that is now the National Sports Centre -- well, it has become a kind of sub-obsession with me. After I visited it for the first time, my father, who grew up in Southwest London, confessed to me that he well remembered the night in 1934 when it burned to the ground, and now I collect all mentions of it, everywhere. This is what H.G. Wells wrote about its former glories in "The New Machiavelli": "The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle and huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life ... As I write of it I feel again the shameful attraction of those gracious forms." And in a song about London in the '50s, Ray Davies sings, "If you're ever up on Highgate Hill on a clear day/you can see right down to Leicester Square,/Crystal Palace, Clapham Common, right up to Streatham Hill/... north and south, I feel that I'm a Londoner still."

That's how I feel whenever I'm on the train from Victoria to the Palace now, and I have equally pungent fantasies about the roads that lead to all the other pools I've swum in. Indeed, my desire to swim in every country I visit has broadened my acquaintanceship with those cities in incalculably valuable ways; the project has been a pleasant byproduct of my obsession with the Olympics -- and that's nice, because in most other ways this obsession has been both morbid and all-consuming.

It is also, like most obsessions, an indication of a warped perception, to which I will freely own up. Yes, I admit that I have been obsessed with the Olympics -- that periodic orgy in pomposity and sentiment -- since a June Saturday in 1972 when I turned on "American Bandstand" only to find it had been preempted by the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Munich. I was 10 years old and mesmerized by the myriad flags and anthems; and from that moment on, my life had a distinct direction.

A few days after I first saw the Olympics, terrorists took over Munich and killed 11 athletes, thus ending forever the idea that the Olympics were everything they said they were. But I was already a convert to the Olympic point of view; I believed in the dream implicitly. To me, the highest honor life could hold would be to compete in the Olympics, and I was willing to do whatever it took