While August is fondly known as the silly season, traditionally a quiet time in the news cycle, as far as the internet is concerned it’s silly season all year round. But even the internet has its quiet periods. When the sun comes out, we become preoccupied with the real world. So it’s lucky we had that minor sporting event the Olympics to help keep us glued to all interfaces. Every four years, it’s a beacon of entertainment during a normally slow summer. And for the internet, it’s meme gold.

If there were a medal for memes, it would probably go to swimming as a whole. Bronze goes to Chinese swimmer Fu Yuanhui and her instantly gif-able facial expressions. Actually, let’s make it a joint bronze with US gymnast Simone Biles. Biles’s gravity-defying flips were the stuff of viral video dreams, as well as unparalleled excellence on the floor.

Michael Phelps gets silver, for once, after his pre-race “death stare” at a fellow swimmer caught the internet’s attention. #PhelpsFace was dubbed the “Crying Jordan of the Rio Games” by AP Sports; Darth Maul’s face was photoshopped on to Phelps’s; and the hashtag soon became shorthand for annoyance everywhere. To give an example using Alanis Morissette’s philosophical frustrations: “When you have 10,000 spoons and all you need is a knife. #phelpsface”.

But the gold medal for meme perfection goes to Ryan Lochte. He made the news out of the pool by claiming, along with three other swimmers, that he had been held at gunpoint by robbers at a petrol station in Rio. Except, after police investigation, it turned out that parts of the story were exaggerated and they had, in fact, vandalised the station’s bathroom. Suddenly, the world was playing detective to this whodunnit as the #Lochtegate trended and Ryan became America’s Swim Shady.

But even as the Games provided a veritable meme buffet, the IOC was not taking its place at the table. Brands piggyback memes all the time, but not the Olympics committee, which clamped down with a strict set of social media rules for any media outlets covering the event. Video or audio used by anyone other than broadcasters with the rights to Olympics coverage were swiftly taken offline. As the IOC pulled down whatever content it could due to copyright infringement, from fans and media alike, it seemed like a case of world sports versus the internet, the former denying the latter new ways of enjoying and digesting athletes’ brilliance. Guys, this isn’t what Harambe would have wanted.

The next summer meme is a hot one. Seven inches from the midday sun, specifically. The 1999 hit Smooth by Santana and Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas has had a 2016 revival. People on the internet have joked about Smooth’s corny lyrics for a while: in 2012 there was a parody Rob Thomas account that tweeted that day’s forecast in the style of the song’s opening line (“Man, it’s a partly cloudy one”, etc). But this month, it’s become ubiquitous. There’s even been Smooth sloganeering printed on T-shirts and a butt plug.

It made sense that this meme dovetailed with the Olympics, specifically with swimmer Katie Ledecky’s world record-shattering 800m freestyle. The gap between her time and the runner-up’s was 11 seconds, which canny tweeter Jimmy Donofrio realised was exactly the time it takes for Smooth’s cheesy opening line to come in. Still with us? Donofrio overlaid the music video with Ledecky’s performance, which many called the “best Olympic tweet yet”. Of course, you can’t watch it any more because the IOC hates fun.

Ending our summer of memes is some Twitter poetry, using one of the most famous opening lines of all time. Here’s how it goes: “Roses are red/ Violets are blue/ Some weird tabloid headline should go here, ideally with a funny picture too.” As with most popular memes, it has a low barrier for entry, so naturally people loved it. It evolved to include screenshots of TV shows and offbeat YouTube video titles. This meme is the perfect collision of everything Twitter loves best: bad poetry, trashy headlines, creativity and an easily copied tweet template. In short: roses are red, it’s getting colder, this tweet has been withheld in response to a report from the copyright holder.