Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Atlanta set for final countdown

In a year's time the 1996 Olympics will be under way. Rupert Cornwell reports

Rupert Cornwell
Wednesday 19 July 1995 23:02 BST
Comments

Quite what festival of Americana will greet the world 12 months hence, in what right now is a giant building site next to Interstate 75 just south of downtown Atlanta, is a secret known only to God, perhaps some Hollywood impresario, and Mr Billy Payne. But two things are certain. Unless the southern climate goes completely haywire, 19 July 1996 will dawn hot and muggy as a sauna. And that afternoon, 83,000 souls packed into a brand new stadium will witness the opening ceremony of the twenty- third Olympic Games of the modern era.

Little more than five years ago, such an assertion would have been nonsensical. These, after all, were the Centennial Games that sentimentally and historically belonged to Athens (Greece, not Georgia). Real Greeks, however, whatever gifts they bore, were no match for Payne, a former Atlanta real estate lawyer who single-handedly turned the improbable quest for the 1996 Olympics into an irresistible holy mission.

Yesterday the dream was exactly a year away from coming true. With its nerves and civic pride atremble - not least from the bulldozers, jackhammers and construction crews working round the clock in their work of transformation - the queen city of the New South awaits her debut, a decade or two prematurely some might unkindly argue, as a certified, mint-condition global metropolis.

Payne, now head of the official Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, will hear no talk of failure, and if the detailed preparations are any guide, there's no disbelieving him. Amid the dust and the bustle, a grand plan fit for the Greek Gods is moving inexorably towards its climax. Only hubris and nemesis can spoil the show. "We're on schedule and we're on budget," he says. "We're going to have the best Olympics ever."

Certainly they will be the biggest and, at $1.58bn (approximately pounds 1bn), easily the most expensive. The total of tickets, 11 million, eclipses those of the 1984 and 1992 games combined. More than 10,000 athletes from a record 197 countries will take part, including 3,779 women competitors (32 per cent more than in any previous Games). They will be housed in no fewer than eight Olympic villages, but the bulk of them at the main one, mercifully the first in history to be air-conditioned, covering 330 acres on the campus of Georgia Tech a mile north of downtown.

Then there are the stadiums: three new arenas and the expansion of a fourth, at a cost of more than $230m. More than three-quarters of that is going on the new Olympic stadium, which - in the architectural equivalent of removing a slat from a dining room table - will be downsized after the Games to become the new home of the city's beloved Atlanta Braves baseball team. The Braves' existing 30-year-old Fulton County Stadium, where Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home run record in 1975, will be used for the Olympic baseball tournament before being torn down.

Athletes, officials and reporters flocking to the home turf of Ted Turner, CNN and Speaker Gingrich will enjoy communications facilities befitting Newt's post-industrial Third Age of Man - including 13,000 special phones, 6,000 pagers, 9,000 mobile two-way radios, 10,000 televisions and 2,000 work-stations featuring touch screen data on anything from 1924 Olympic swimming statistics to the hottest seafood restaurants in town.

As the ACOG's "The Final Year at a Glance" brochure makes clear, nothing, but nothing, is being left to chance. To make sure the whole thing works, Atlanta is hosting 18 national and international sports and cultural events over the next four months. A new traffic system has already been devised. Late this month work begins on the free- standing, 132-foot tall Olympic Cauldron, where the flame will be lit a year from yesterday. In autumn, auditions will be held in Atlanta of up to 10,000 people to take part in the opening and closing ceremonies, for which rehearsals begin next May.

And despite a few hiccups, Payne and ACOG are on course to foot the bill. Atlanta 1996, funded almost entirely by private money, is unlikely to be a money-spinner like Los Angeles 12 years ago. But the cost will be more than met by the sale of TV rights, sponsorship deals and merchandising of licensed goods (alone forecast to generate retail sales of $2bn or more). More than 30 sponsors have already been lined up by Atlanta Centennial Olympic properties, some of them obvious suspects including the Atlanta- based Coca-Cola, which is putting up $100m, Anheuser-Busch, AT&T and Swatch. Others are especially susceptible to the myths of the Old South. For instance, the German car maker, Daimler Benz, has bought up the near-derelict home of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With The Wind, which it will restore, use as a hospitality centre during the Games, and then hand over to the Atlanta municipality as a museum.

True there have been problems: reports of price gouging by hotels, and the odd fiddle over the allocation of choice tickets. The property rental market has also gone berserk, with some local owners planning to move out and let their houses for anything up to $100,000 for the three weeks of the Games. These however are modest gripes, only to be expected given the estimated $5bn windfall the Olympics will shower on the local economy. And Atlanta, to borrow a metaphor from the Braves, has every base covered.

Yesterday in Lausanne, Juan Antonio Samaranch, chairman of the International Olympic Committee, ceremonially dispatched the invitations to attend the Games. And who, amid much pomp and publicity, is delivering these precious missives to 197 national committees around the world ? United Parcel Services, based - naturally - in Atlanta.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in