Rain. It pelts against the plane windows after a landing at Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport, forcing an unprepared visitor to search the terminals for rain gear. The visitor winds up with a $28 Olympic Torch Relay Umbrella. It will be among the few tangible reminders of the 100th anniversary Olympics that were going on in Atlanta at this time a year ago.
Rain. It is a reminder of the weather Saturday morning, July 27, 1996–exactly one year ago–and the sight of two-time Olympic heptathlon champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee splashing over hurdles in the first and only event she would complete before dropping out of the heptathlon with a leg injury. It is a reminder of the morning the Games went on, fewer than eight hours after the tragic bombing in Centennial Olympic Park.
Rain can cleanse and clear the air, but the rain that morning only made the blood stains run across the park. A year later, the bombing remains an unsolved mystery. It is part of the murky atmosphere that forever may prevent Atlanta from being remembered clearly as an Olympic city, let alone the host city for the Centennial Olympic Games.
“There doesn’t seem to be anything lasting,” said Atlantan Terrence Crossman. “I don’t think it’s because of the bombing that no one wants to remember Atlanta. The focus was on getting the Games here, but there was no long-term goal. No one thought about how we were going to keep the memories alive.”
As he spoke, Crossman was standing in what remains of Centennial Olympic Park, still a work in progress. At 9 p.m. last Wednesday, after the rain had stopped, he was among a half-dozen people in a park that a year ago was filled with tens of thousands.
In the late afternoon Wednesday, when it was dry, and at midday Thursday, when it was sunny and hot, Atlanta’s downtown sidewalks and plazas were virtually deserted. Light posts where Olympic banners hung have been redecorated by gang graffiti. It was almost enough to make one wish for the return of the tacky vending stalls that clogged the area a year ago.
The main headline on the July cover of “Where” magazine’s Atlanta issue says, “Celebrate Summer in Centennial Olympic Park.” There isn’t much to celebrate. In its incomplete version, the park has been reduced to barely two square blocks. The spot where the bombing occurred is in a fenced-off construction zone.
A sign promises the park’s visitors center will be finished in summer, 1997. A sign near the once dazzling, Olympic-rings fountain says the fountain is closed for the winter. Other signs explain the fountain is closed for maintenance.
Odd timing. At the very moment when Atlantans and visitors might have tried to maintain a little of the Olympic experience, the park’s management decides to stop the flow of memories for maintenance. It was another cloudburst in the rain of error that inundated parts of the Games, then and now.
Work on the park is supposed to end later this year. In the area under construction, there will be six monuments commemorating the Centennial Games. One will be to Alice Hawthorne, the woman killed by the bomb. Yet the park’s current state reflects what may be the cenotaph for the Atlanta Games: They were so right and so wrong at the same time.
“Atlanta,” said Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles, “will be remembered as a problematic Olympic city.”
DeFrantz, the senior International Olympic Committee member in the United States, has been critical of Atlanta’s Olympic organization and laudatory of the quality of its sports competitions. After returning for a July 19 celebration to mark the opening of the 1996 Games, she left impressed by the new site for one of the Olympics’ most controversial landmarks, the 180-foot-high flame caldron.
“They have given the french fry container an imposing character,” DeFrantz said.
After months during which the caldron seemed doomed to destruction, it was moved about a quarter-mile north of its previous position at a corner of what was the Olympic Stadium. The street next to the caldron is bridged by the five Olympic rings, and a one-block stretch unofficially labeled Olympic Way contains some of the light columns from the stadium.
At the caldron’s base is a metal plaque on which the names of all medalists have been engraved, but the metal already has been badly stained by rain. According to Ginger Watkins, executive vice president of the recently dissolved Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG), contractors were to look at the problem Friday and come up with a solution that would not stop visitors from the pleasing but unexpected pursuit of taking paper rubbings of the names.
Right and wrong, at the same time.
That also applies to the caldron’s new home. It is right across the street from the Juvenile Court and Detention Center. Of course, even that is less disconcerting than the old site, a corner of the plaza leading to Turner Field, where baseball is the only game around.
“I knew they had the Olympic Stadium here,” said Billy Broughton of Tuscaloosa, Ala. “If you look from the outside, you would think it was just a baseball stadium. It’s kind of weird.”
Broughton and his family were among the 5,000 people who had taken guided tours of Turner Field during the first 22 days the Braves had offered such visits of their new stadium. In a clever reconfiguration, what might have stood as a white elephant Olympic Stadium with 85,000 seats has been converted to an attractive baseball park with 50,528.
The wrong is that nowhere inside or immediately outside is there any evidence of what happened there a year ago, of the opening of closing ceremonies or Carl Lewis’ golden jump or Michael Johnson’s world record in the 200 meters or Josiah Thugwane’s marathon triumph. The track was removed and part of it given to Clark Atlanta University, where it rings the Olympic field hockey venue that has been converted to a football field.
At Turner Field, as at Clark and the World Congress Center, where seven sports took place, there are no Olympic points of reference. It is too soon for ghosts, too disorientingly different for memories.
“There still is a spirit of greatness here because more great sports things are going on in the stadium,” said Charlotte Thorn, a security manager at Turner Field.
“I don’t know all the details, but there will be a plaque on the ground where the caldron stood and another at the south end of the stadium that says this was the site of the Olympic athletics competition,” Watkins said.
The tumbledown houses one block south of the stadium have tumbled down even more in the past year. More screens are tattered, porches crumbling and roofing torn. They support a recent Georgia Institute of Techology study headlined in a university press release, “Olympics Do Little for Atlanta’s Low-Income Neighborhoods.”
At the Stadium Grocery, a convenience store in the Summerhill neighborhood diagonally across the street from Turner Field’s southeast end, plumbing contractor Richard Ware has different evidence. Ware, waiting to discuss expansion plans with the store’s owner, takes a visitor on a tour of the 4,500-resident neighborhood, pointing out more than a dozen houses being renovated or rebuilt.
“People thought with the Olympics coming, the city would be turned around overnight,” Ware said. “You can’t neglect inner-city neighborhoods for 15 or 20 years and then expect them to come back overnight.
“The Olympics kick-started everything in this neighborhood. What impresses me is that it didn’t stop with the Olympics, and I don’t see it ending any time soon.”
The Georgia Tech study cited Summerhill as one of two downtown neighborhoods that had been altered significantly. It noted that 14 others targeted for redevelopment “saw little spillover.”
“I’ll argue with anyone who said these areas weren’t helped,” said Douglas Dean, president of Summerhill Neighborhood, Inc. “Billy Payne was an advocate for places like Summerhill, Peoplestown and Mechanicsville (low-income neighborhoods just south of downtown).”
Former ACOG President Payne now works two miles and an insurmountable distance from such neighborhoods. Payne is a Nations Bank vice chairman in charge partly of corporate schmoozing and imagemaking, a task that Thursday morning had him headed for an 8:30 tee time with two clients. His left elbow is sore from playing so much golf.
Payne’s office on the 55th floor of the Nations Bank Building seems bigger than some of the houses in Summerhill. Yet he has become something of a folk hero in Atlanta, besought for autographs and pats on the back as the man whose wildest dream came true when the Olympics, however flawed, took place in his hometown.
No one is more aware of the dichotomy of views about the Atlanta Olympics than Payne. Transportation and information system breakdowns and the city’s tawdry state-fair ambiance left the Atlanta Games to be excoriated by opinion-makers in the media and damned with faint praise from the IOC, which should have assumed more blame itself for lack of supervision. Yet most spectators liked the Games and the atmosphere, and Payne says nearly 50,000 have written to tell him so.
“Believing this letter is better late than never, we thank you for having the vision to hold the Olympics in Atlanta,” said Maurice and Jeanette Brancamp of Waukegan in a letter dated July 15, 1997. “Attending an Olympic event was a longtime dream of ours, and although we could only spend three days in the Atlanta area, (they) provided a lifetime of memories. . . . Our experience . . . was entirely positive.”
Payne can justifiably claim such letters as a postmortem for the Olympics, even in the face of class-action suits by ticket buyers (settled for $1.65 million) and vendors (a potential $50 million liability) who believed they were made deceptive promises to buy vending rights and locations. He can even put a spin on the transportation and information problems with statistics that allegedly minimize their scope.
“From our perspective, we pulled off a miracle,” Payne said.
Assessing the Olympic legacy, other than the $500 million in facilities left to the city, Payne resorted to his relentless idealism.
“The Olympics was really an example of how you can bring people together from all over the world and have them discover they have affection for each other,” he said. “That experience can give people hope.”
DeFrantz put it in similar terms in a brief speech at the year-after party.
“Close your eyes and bring up a memory,” she said. “You have been enriched by the experience. It is not a physical legacy, but a human legacy.”
Debbie Dorsey, aquatics director at Georgia Tech, sees both the ideal and the real in people who use the scaled-down swimming and diving venue for exercise or a variety of parties, including family reunions. The school hopes to raise money to enclose the pool, thereby extending its current April-through-October operations.
“I hear coaches tell their swimmers, `This is the place where Amy Van Dyken won her gold medals,’ and I have people come in here just to touch the `holy water,’ ” Dorsey said.
Such reactions undoubtedly are encouraged by the pool’s having retained much of its Olympic decoration. Although the 12,000 temporary seats were removed, leaving 2,000 seats and changing the appearance considerably, the pool remains the most easily identifiable Olympic sports venue.
The Olympic Village buildings that have become Georgia Tech dorm rooms with a view of the pool bear no indication of their previous use, even if some students might have been pleased to learn a gold medalist slept there. A Jamaican sticker in a laundry room is the most sophomore Brian Lee has seen.
“I don’t get any sense of an Olympic connection,” Lee said.
At the Inforum, the exhibition center and office complex that housed ACOG offices and the main press center, the large Olympic banners in the atrium were taken down last week. Curious timing again.
The day before the anniversary of the opening ceremony, Inforum newstand owner Allyson Taylor and co-worker Peter Cutler put on their Olympic pin vests and did a mock torch relay in the store with Olympic flame flashlights.
“Nobody got it,” Taylor said. “It was really sad.”
