Twenty years ago today, Atlanta was on the cusp of becoming what it had always dreamed of being.
We were about a year away from Opening Ceremonies. The hard and miserable work of preparation was winding down. The venues were largely completed and were days away from their international sports debut with 4,000 athletes in town for the Atlanta ’95 competitions.
Could you imagine what we would make now of a major international competition with so many athletes from so many places? In those days, it was mere dress rehearsal.
Downtown streets that for years had been lonely, shadowy strips were beginning to foretell the happy bustle to come. Instant cafes, cabarets and outdoor concerts were just beginning to fill the sultry night air with music, noise and laughter.
We were still all expectations. Kids on Christmas Eve. A dream about to come true.
These days, I wonder whether even an archaeologist in 20 more years will be able to tell that anything of note happened here.
Most of the venues have been obliterated or retrofitted into an unrecognizable state. Even the Olympic Stadium – the traditional Olympic centerpiece – was at once converted into a baseball park for the Braves. After the Braves depart, then what?
To be sure, Centennial Olympic Park is the one clear physical artifact that commemorates the Games. When I go there to make sure no one has stolen my bricks, the memory does indeed return.
Yet, Atlanta never became a magnet for Olympic sports, such as track and field, swimming, etc., as many in the sporting world had hoped. And, rightly or wrongly, the Olympic world, fairly or not, tends to recall the experience here unfavorably.
Once the flame was extinguished, our familiar problems returned.
Maybe we expected too much.
The Olympic Games is one of those rare experiences that begins in celebration and ends in exhaustion. It’s not unlike being awarded a Super Bowl trophy and then spending the entire season proving that you deserve it. In this case it’s six seasons, and much of that time is spent convincing ourselves that the disruption, expense and annoyance was worth it.
Hosting the Games is sometimes described as the closest thing to waging war without actually killing anybody on purpose. At times it did seem an alien occupying force armed with orange cones had taken over.
In asking a few Olympic alums about the legacy issue, I gathered that others had also thought — and some worried — about it.
Dick Yarbrough, the then-spokesman for the organizing committee, wondered whether we simply had expected too much. “Twenty years of hindsight says we all oversold the lasting impact of the Games,” he wrote in an email. “I suspect the same can be said for most of the cities that have hosted the Olympics.
“The Games did exactly what they were supposed to do — provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for athletes from around the world to gather in peaceful competition. As I look back, that was the legacy we should have expected and of which we should be most proud. The fact that there is not a lot to show for our efforts is a result of our collective inability to live up to our own expectations.”
I confess, I had expected more. I remember sitting in the marble stadium where the Modern Olympics were reborn in Athens in 1896 – a century before the Atlanta Games. I’ve even been to the complex at Ancient Olympia, where athletes from around the known world assembled to compete. I’ve visited the old stadiums in Berlin, Montreal and Los Angeles. I also walked on the beaches in a Barcelona that had been reborn in the stunning transformation as the 1992 host city.
So, yes, I came to expect a lot. Maybe too much.
When I put the question to Charlie Battle, one of the few folks who worked with the Atlanta effort from bid to Closing Ceremony, he suggested that a sociologist would be a better judge than an archaeologist.
“Our Games were always going to be about memories not monuments,” Battle said. “I continue to believe very strongly that these memories and recollections are very positive.”
He recalled that Billy Payne often said that hosting the Olympics “was not about how many facilities would be built but how many lives would be affected.”
A.D. Frazier, who ran the organizing committee, also takes a less “monument oriented” view
Frazier views the Games more as something that bent the arch of Atlanta’s evolution, rather than an event that created relics. “The tone and texture of downtown and midtown is certainly far better than it was trending before we started,” he said. “There became a renewed interest — almost like a land rush to locate new office buildings, hotels, condos, shops, apartments in what you will have to admit was a pretty shabby downtown.”
He also noted that the Olympics seeded businesses owned by women and minorities, many of which thrive two decades later.
Whatever Atlanta’s place with the Olympic family, Frazier believes that the Games did raise Atlanta’s worldwide stock. “Atlanta now ranks among an elite club of cities that the world knows, and remembers as having the guts and determination to take on — and deliver — one of the most complex international events in peacetime — in our case, with private money,” he said. “That will never happen again.”
“I don’t know what you were dreaming in 1991,” he said. “But I, for one, can look back over six insane years of effort and smile 20 years later.”
Nevertheless, something still seems missing today. The Olympics had a way of joining people — even people who could barely stand each other — in a common purpose. Don’t think for a minute that the leaders like Zell Miller, Billy Payne and Maynard Jackson liked hanging together. Yet, they put aside their differences to get things done. I’m not so sure we see that dynamic so much these days – think transportation crisis, education, our polarization, even the awkward failure of Atlanta’s effort to land the relatively modest Nobel Laureates event.
Two decades after that June ripe with expectations, I still feel that Atlanta is on the cusp of becoming what it had always dreamed of being.
Maybe it always will be.
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