Nearly every family has one: The eccentric old relative stashed away in a corner. The person everyone tends to ignore and conveniently forget about.
Atlanta, meet yours: The 1996 Olympic caldron.
While other Olympic cities celebrate and even cash in on their caldrons, Atlanta’s erstwhile icon languishes at the traffic-choked intersection of Fulton Street and Hank Aaron Drive.
Once the center of worldwide exhilaration as Muhammad Ali shook off the effects of Parkinson’s disease and lit the flame to open the Games, the caldron now idles in relative obscurity next to a parking lot.
“It just sits there,” Andrew Young, former Atlanta mayor and chairman of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, said recently, with an audible sigh.
“I pass right by it and I don’t see it.”
Fifteen years after the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the caldron is neither a historic destination point nor is it honored by being fired up again for special occasions, as its peers are in Sydney and Vancouver, British Columbia.
Mostly, it leads to headscratching.
“I knew it had something to do with the Olympics, but I wasn’t sure what,” said David Ponder, 32, gazing up recently at the 116-foot structure casting shadows over the blue lot at Turner Field, where he parks as a Georgia State student. “Why don’t they ever light it up?”
Please. The caldron was lucky even to find a home after the Olympics.
The Braves, who took over the converted Olympic stadium after the Games, didn’t want it. Enter the retired caldron’s version of assisted living: It was moved up the street and ACOG set up a $200,000 trust fund to maintain it when it handed ownership over to the Atlanta-Fulton County Recreational Authority.
The authority spends about $2,500 annually on routine maintenance and lighting of the structure, said executive director Violet Travis Ricks. Previously, loose decking has been repaired and damaged stair treads replaced.
A large-scale refurbishment planned for the near future could cost several hundred thousand dollars.
But that just takes care of the physical side. Rehabbing the beleaguered caldron’s image will be much harder — but well worth the effort, some people contend.
It’s time to give the caldron its due, they say.
“It’s been sitting there doing its job for 15 years, and it’s time for someone to come along and build off of the great memories it created,” said Richard Monteilh, former executive director of the Metropolitan Atlanta Olympic Games Authority, which oversaw all Olympic construction contracts and built the stadium.
“It’s the bright star that put Atlanta on the map internationally.”
A bright star? Or “just a big old thing on the street?”
That’s how Bob Hope, the veteran Atlanta marketing executive and sports promoter, describes the enormous structure that some Games-goers derided as clunky and unattractive at the time. One newspaper columnist likened it to a McDonald’s french fry container.
What other cities do
Today, it looks out of place — and context — in a largely empty urban expanse of parking lots, honking cars and nondescript office buildings.
It went there “because we could get it up fairly quickly because it was such a short distance it was being moved,” Billy Payne, the original dreamer behind Atlanta’s Olympic bid and later ACOG’s president, recalled by phone from Wyoming last week.
Why not put it in Centennial Olympic Park, as some people have suggested?
“I think the issue about moving it to the park would be, how much of a footprint does it take up?,” said Payne, who also came up with the idea for the 21-acre jewel and its signature Fountain of Rings in the heart of downtown. “The theory is those open green spaces make the park special.”
Hope would like to see the caldron relocated to a setting more befitting its once-revered status.
“When you have something that is a symbol of greatness, a moment in time when you were the absolute center of the world, that should be celebrated,” Hope said.
He suggested moving the caldron to the Georgia World Congress Center plaza, where there would be plenty of foot traffic from the attractions in and around nearby Centennial Olympic Park — and many big events practically begging for a caldron relighting.
“That was our moment,” continued Hope, who happened to turn around in his seat during the Opening Ceremony on July 19, 1996, and, after midnight, saw Ali creep out of his nearby hiding spot in preparation for lighting the caldron.
“If we don’t honor that, what should we honor?”
Not all Olympic host cities permanently retire their caldrons. No matter what the International Olympic Committee likes to think.
“Post-Games usage of the cauldron is in principle not intended, and at least not without prior IOC approval,” the IOC’s Research and Reference Service wrote in an email from Lausanne, Switzerland.
Requests are handled on “a case by case basis,” it explained, such as one granted to Los Angeles to reignite the 1984 Summer Olympics caldron in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.
A Sydney Olympic Park spokesperson says its caldron has been relit “numerous times ... in particular for the annual anniversary of the 2000 Games Opening Ceremony.”
Part of celebrations
In a park adjacent to the former Olympic stadium, Sydney’s caldron was converted into a stunning fountain that rains water down on people frolicking below and serves as the centerpiece for major festivals, sporting events and outdoor movie screenings. The caldron was recently Heritage-listed in Australia, meaning it is formally designated a place “of State historic significance.”
In Vancouver, the 2010 Winter Olympics caldron has a permanent home on a plaza adjacent to the Vancouver Convention Centre. For a minimum of $5,000, events or groups booked into the hall can request to have it relighted against a gorgeous backdrop of mountains and water.
Payne sounded less than thrilled at the thought of something similar happening to Atlanta’s caldron. “Without criticizing them,” he said, “I would say I don’t think we should ever attempt to commercialize the significance of that moment by coming up with some paid rent or leasing [opportunity]. That’s too inconsistent with what it was intended to be about.”
ESPN has deemed the 1996 caldron lighting one of the 10 most patriotic events in U.S. sports history.
The company that owns the Vancouver convention center also fires up the caldron on significant public occasions, such as Canada Day, Remembrance Day (which honors veterans) and — are you paying attention there, IOC?— Game 3 of this year’s Stanley Cup finals between the Vancouver Canucks and Boston Bruins.
“The plaza was meant to be a gathering place for the community during festivals and important events,” said Convention Centre communications manager Jinny Wu, who estimates several hundred thousand people turned out for this year’s Canada Day celebration.
“But we’re now also seeing whole buses of visitors come and take photos of it even when it’s not lit.”
Meanwhile, the No. 32 MARTA bus stop on Hank Aaron Drive is the closest Atlanta’s caldron gets to anything like that. A seemingly endless line of Turner Field Police barricades along both sides of the road is unintentionally offputting to visitors.
Not that anyone really promotes the caldron’s presence — it’s not on the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau’s list of “50 Fun Things to Do in Atlanta,” for instance. Nor is it mentioned in the Olympic stadium history section on the Turner Field web site.
Symbol’s future
That’s unfortunate, because the caldron site is well maintained and worth spending time at. Steps lead down to a small plaza studded with handsome plaques that list all the 1996 medalists, celebrate the Olympic spirit (“You can build for a brief time one family ...”) and explain caldron creator Siah Armajani’s concept for it and the attached bridge.
A consultant is working with a structural engineer to determine the scope of the upcoming caldron repainting and refurbishment project, which will probably happen sometime after the end of the Braves’ season.
What could cost about $190,000 simply has to be done, said Fulton County Commissioner Tom Lowe, a longtime authority board member.
“You can’t have a steel structure sitting out there — I don’t care if it’s a water tower, a sign or a caldron — without having it regularly painted and maintained,” Lowe said.
Lowe estimated it would cost about $1 million to relocate the caldron again.
Not to mention the accompanying angst such a move might create. “I think if we started talking about tearing it down,” Lowe said, “there’d be some groups that would say, ‘Hell, no!’ ”
Payne said, “If the consensus of the community was that we should make [the caldron] available to more people, I’d be in favor of that.” He also emphasized that he has “no authority” in the matter now.
Meanwhile, Andrew Young is more interested in starting over than tearing down.
Never a fan of our caldron — “It’s probably my only regret for the Olympics,” he said last week — he admits it has gotten him thinking lately about what maybe should be Atlanta’s iconic image.
“We could build an appropriate memorial to the Atlanta Olympics that’s also a memorial to a city of progress and vision,” said Young. “Socially, politically, we’re an amazing city, and that thing just doesn’t fit.”
By 2016, it could be another story.
“Maybe the 20th anniversary of the Olympics would give us time to come up with something perfect,” Young said. “We’ve got five years to think about it.”
