The Olympic Games are with us again, and any minute now we’ll start reading treatises to designate, anoint and canonize “the world’s greatest athlete.” A world assembly of jocks and jockesses always triggers such speculation; it’s fun to peruse it. As the incomparable Yogi Berra says, “You can see a lot by observing.”

American Jim Thorpe may have been the point man for such a subjective selection process. Jim won both the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Games in Sweden. He also happened to be a great football player and good baseballer. Pretty solid place to start. Thorpe’s medals, symbolic of amateurism, were stripped because he supposedly got a few bucks to play baseball at the wrong time. Fortunately, that grievous error has been corrected, though he never lived to enjoy it.

World’s greatest athlete (WGA) discussions ebb and flow. American Jesse Owens with his four Olympic gold medals sometimes is mentioned (though not in the same breath with Maurice Greene, self-baptized “greatest of all time” — patent pending). Came 1948 and a 17-year-old from Tulare, Calif., Bob Mathias, won the decathlon in London. He repeated the feat in 1952 at Helsinki, Finland.

The fact he played fullback for the Stanford football team and dabbled as a college basketball squadman made Mathias a prime suspect.

Winning the decathlon always has brought out WGA hustlers, thus was that label applied when Great Britain’s Daley Thompson was 10-event champ in both 1980 and 1984. He set a world record for total points in ’84, so his candidacy was a certainty at least for a while.

American discus legend Al Oerter and Czechoslovakia’s Emil Zatopek, an incredible distance man, have backers, but they are one-talent entries. The selection should entail at least two sports. That said, nobody comes even close to my WGA hero, who never had anything to do with the Olympic Games and achieved immortality in what some argue was his fifth best sport.

Let’s go with Jackie Robinson, who excelled in at least six sports and changed the face of athletics and, in many respects, our society. If you can dig up anyone more deserving of the ultimate WGA medal, send me the dossier — for any century, millenium or temporal span. You’re facing a hard sell.

Some salient bits and pieces about Jackie:

He was born in Cairo, Ga., and taken by his widowed mother along with three brothers and a sister to Pasadena, Calif., as a child. He shined shoes, sold scrap metal and hawked hot dogs at the Rose Bowl to help his struggling clan.

Began at Pasadena Junior College, where he starred for one year in basketball, track and baseball and got noticed by UCLA. As a Bruin football tailback, he averaged 12 yards a rush one season and led the nation in punt-return yardage another. Made some All-America teams in 1940 and 1941.

Was all-league as a basketball standout and led the Pacific Coast in scoring in 1940 and 1941. Sprinted on the track team, competed with relay units, won the national college broad jump title as a senior. Played shortstop in baseball and was the first four-sport letterman in Uclan history.

Robinson also was a highly regarded tennis and golf player when black guys weren’t exactly herded onto courts and courses. Often weren’t even allowed on-site. He reached the national college tennis seminfals as a senior. That was when several awed coaches contended that baseball was only “his fifth best sport.”

Eager to do his World War II part, Robinson entered the Army for three years in 1942 and achieved the rank of lieutenant. He beat a court-martial charge filed when he once refused to go to the back of a military bus. He’d only begun to fight.

Still in uniform, Jackie coached the basketball team at Sam Houston College one season and his team won the city championship. In 1945, he started out at $400 a month with baseball’s Kansas City Monarchs; in August of that year he signed with Montreal of the International League. It was a Brooklyn Dodger farm club and Robby was the first “Negro” in “organized baseball”.

Montreal, with Robinson as the spark, won the ’46 International League pennant and took the Little World Series. Jackie was league batting champ.

In 1947 he was 28 years old, yes, 28, and was added to a sometimes hostile, resentful Brooklyn roster by visionary Branch Rickey. A shortstop since college, Jackie played first, second and third base and had productive time in the outfield. He faced horrendous odds, constant threats, physical intimidation and violence from opponents, shunning from some teammates — yet he still was National League rookie of the year for 1947.

He took a brutal mental and physical licking but kept on ticking by summoning overwhelming courage and grace under pressure. He could have whipped the daylights out of most of his tormentors; few athletes ever have displayed the self-control he had to exert every day, sometimes every minute. Columnist Red Smith watched Jack lead Brooklyn to a pennant and World Series title in 1955 against the New York Yankees and described it as “the unconquerable doing the impossible.”

Incredibly, the Dodgers traded him to the hated New York Giants in 1956, and Jackie quick-like retired as a player. Successful businessman, family man, athletic and social icon, he refused to accept the bad cards dealt him and created his own deck of aces, kings and queens as an athlete and citizen. Diabetes claimed him in 1972 at the tender age of 53.

Nobody involved with the Olympics ever did anything close to all that. Unless you have some enchanted candidate from outer space, maybe Krypton, you won’t nudge Jackie Robinson from the top of my list of the world’s greatest athletes — ever!