The International Olympic Committee has proven itself to be an easy target for criticism over the years, and why not? It purports to champion the spirit of sportsmanship and fair play, but what the IOC really values is – no surprise here – money. In that vein, it’s not so different from other bastions of athletic hypocrisy like FIFA or the NCAA.

Unfortunately, we have long passed the point where it’s possible to separate international athletic competition from the realm of geopolitics, if it was ever possible at all.

At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, for instance, the IOC was criticized for awarding the games to a country with an abysmal human-rights record and a history of supporting repressive regimes in other countries.

At the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the old Soviet Union and a number of satellite countries boycotted the games. That was payback for the decision by former President Jimmy Carter to not send U.S. athletes to the 1980 games in Moscow because the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan.

Go back to 1936 and Adolf Hitler tried to use the games to make a political statement about white supremacy, though an African-American sprinter named Jesse Owens had plenty to say about that.

Political games have long been a subtext of the Olympic games, to the point where the spirit of the world’s countries coming together to compete can sometimes get lost.

So when the IOC does something that smacks of genuine humanity, it stands out.

That humanity will be on full display when the opening ceremonies get underway in Rio on Friday.

The opening ceremonies are, we think, the best part of the Olympic games. Amid great pageantry – and nobody does pageantry like Brazilians – athletes from each of the participating countries will march into the stadium under their country’s flag.

If nationalism is sometimes defined as excessive pride in one’s own country and contempt toward all other nations, the opening ceremonies of the Olympics demonstrate, for one glorious night, how wonderful nationalism looks devoid of the contempt.

But what if you were a world-class athlete – a swimmer or sprinter, perhaps – without a country?

Hard as it is to imagine, such people exist.

Or maybe it’s not so hard to imagine, given the strife the world is burdened with today.

They’re called refugees, and there are uncounted thousands of them out there from war-ravaged countries like Syria, South Sudan and Ethiopia.

Ten such athletes who might have marched under their country’s banner had they not been forced to flee for their lives will instead march in under the banner of the Olympic flag. They make up the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team.

“These refugees have no home, no team, no flag, no national anthem. We will offer them a home in the Olympic Village together with all the athletes of the world,” IOC President Thomas Bach said.

There will be many wonderful stories to come out of these Olympics in the next two weeks, but the best is this one, which happened before the competition even began.