Hearing Their Footsteps, Sharing Their Joy

Credit...Alexandra Garcia/The New York TimesTOKYO — It was a week and a half of extremes.

Extreme heat. Extreme spikes and an extreme track, two technological advances that combined to produce extreme times. But also an extreme absence of spectators, a vacuum that the athletes sought to camouflage with extreme performances.

Track and field at the Tokyo Games helped fill the final 10 days of the Olympic schedule, and five years — in so many ways — was worth the wait. Members of the old guard played starring roles once more, some of them for their final time, and a new generation stepped forward, many of them in events that had so often been overshadowed in the past.

These were the Games of the…