Yes, London, the Olympics were held in Atlanta

That puts Atlanta on, uh, equal footing with the last city to host a Summer Olympics just before its megalomaniacal leader invaded large parts of Europe and plunged the world into a second devastating war.

What did we ever do to you, London (other than sending a bunch of soldiers Over There twice to help save your bacon) to make you squeeze us out like poor little Jordyn Wieber from the gymnastics all-around final?

"Danny Boyle chose a selection of posters from some, but not all previous Olympic Games to appear in the film that opened the Ceremony," the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) confirmed to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday in a statement.

Boyle is the Academy Award-winning director ("Slumdog Millionaire") who produced the Opening Ceremony, which a record 40.7 million people watched on NBC. In the video (see it at www.nbcolympics.com/video/2012/opening-ceremony-the-isles-of-wonder.html), the posters flit in and out of view rather quickly; it's conceivable that not everyone watching here in the city that's home to major Olympic medal winners and sponsors like Coca-Cola and UPS would even have picked up on the perceived diss.

But that doesn't necessarily lessen the sting.

"As an Atlanta-based corporation, we never hesitate to tell people all over the world how proud we were and are of the way Atlanta handled those Games," said Norman Black, spokesman for UPS, the official Logistics and Express Delivery Supporter of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, who hadn't seen the video. "It would be very surprising if Atlanta was the only city left out of that video."

To be entirely fair, it wasn't. The poster from the 1932 Los Angeles Games was included in the montage but the one from the 1984 Los Angeles Games wasn't. That would be the same Games where LOCOG Chairman Sebastian Coe won a gold medal in the 1500 meter run. Either he's super forgetful or he has even less pull with Boyle than Atlanta does.

Besides Atlanta, the only other host city missing from the montage was 1936 host Berlin. Those Games are probably best remembered as the ones where German Chancellor Adolf Hitler did not shake hands with Jesse Owens, the American track and field star who won four gold medals. Three years later, Hitler's Germany invaded Poland to start World War II. That caused the next two Summer Olympics to be canceled entirely.

Flattery will get you everywhere, LOCOG. Indeed, we shudder to think how much worse things might have turned out for Atlanta last Friday night if Great Britain wasn't America's staunchest ally.

Unless maybe we're overreacting.

LOCOG said Wednesday it hadn't received any complaints about Atlanta's omission, which some folks on this side of the pond hypothesized might have been ordered up by an imperious International Olympic Committee still smarting over some aspect of the '96 Games. Or, who knows? Maybe the Queen just really, really hates SEC football.

Nothing so nefarious as all that, LOCOG seemed to suggest.

"There was no conscious decision to omit any city," the organizers' prepared statement concluded. "It was simply that not all posters could fit into the time available in the film."

For the record, the decision to exclude some Olympic posters did not extend to host nation England: all three Olympics held on the isle were represented by their posters (1908, 1948 and, of course, 2012).

LOCOG's mea culpa was good enough for one of the key figures involved in staging Atlanta's Olympics.

"I would take them at their word, I don't think there was any malicious forethought to it," said Dick Yarbrough, who was managing director of communications for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. "Someone once said [creating an Olympics from scratch] is like trying to build a 747 while it's flying. It's very hard to do. I would say it was probably not a very important decision to them that, 'We have to make sure we get everyone in there.' "

Well. Isn't that special?