Those watching the men’s Olympics gymnastic competition on television back home knew they’d seen magic.

Cheers erupted from a far back corner of the stands, where Simone Biles and the rest of the women’s team screamed as loud as lungs could muster to cut through the eerie quiet of the pandemic Olympic venue.

It barely feels like an Olympics to him, he said, but when he stuck that landing and heard his own team cheering, that felt like enough.

At the Sea Forest Waterway rowing venue, grandstands that stretch for nearly 2,000 meters (yards) are empty all the way to the finish line.

What is typically a swelling crescendo of chants and rush of adrenaline over the final 250 meters to the finish line replaced by the labored breathing wracking their lungs.

“When you cross the line and you’re hurting, and you feel like you are going to pass out and you don’t hear the ‘USA.

USA!’, chant it hurts a little bit more,” said ÚS women’s rower Ellen Tomek, competing in her third Olympics and reminding herself that people are rooting from her from home.

Japanese gymnast Mai Murakami said she was thrilled that her home country hosted the Olympics because she hoped many of her admirers could see her perform in person.

This Olympics, she said, feels very different.

There were many, many people cheering for us, and here we had silence,” she said, drawing a flat line with her hand.

“I think that Olympic Games is enough of its own,” said Greece men’s water polo goaltender Emmanouil Zerdevas.

“Normally, coming into the finish line, when qualification is on the line, it’s deafening,” said U.S.