"Maybe other countries wouldn’t have done it, but Tokyo did it.”

In this brand-new edition of My Tokyo, we hear from a US-based photographer and a French radio reporter about their experiences and memories of covering the Summer Olympic Games and exploring the city itself.

For Patrick Smith, a staff photographer with Getty Images, he was “thrilled” to go on assignment to Tokyo this year - having visited Japan before and fallen in love with the country.

“As a professional sports photographer, there’s no greater event than the Olympics,” he says, as he recalls capturing iconic images of athletes at the Japan National Stadium, in Tokyo.

“Being at the Tokyo 2020 Games, in the National Stadium, covering the athletics, makes your heart beat and it makes the athletes’ hearts beat,” Patrick explains.

“Shooting events like the pole vault, where an athlete is levitating across the air, seeing the iconic views of the stadium, the woodwork at the top, is very historic and something that I’ll never forget.”

For Patrick, Tokyo is a mesmerising city, which never fails to leave its mark on him.

“Coming back from the stadium every night, from the athletics, you weren’t talking to your colleagues. You were looking out the window,” he says.

“You were seeing the Tokyo Tower, it looks like the Eiffel Tower. It’s the Statue of Liberty, as in New York.”

He likens Tokyo to being “in this amusement park of real life, which is its beauty.”

Patrick explains: “It’s the temples you get to go by. You can get off a train and go to a temple one minute and be in a different part of the city 10 steps later. It’s the history. It’s the new, it’s the old.”

Back home in America, Patrick shares his photo memories from Tokyo with his two young children.

“When I speak about Tokyo to my children, I tell them how safe it is. They’ll be