Analysis : Geography Keyed Atlanta’s Selection : Olympics: The city’s campaign to hold the ’96 Games benefited from TV considerations and the help of the NFL.

It began as the dream of a former University of Georgia football All-American named Billy Payne, who had just finished raising the money to build a new sanctuary for his church and was looking for something else to do.

It became a two-year, $7-million crusade to win the 1996 Summer Olympics for Atlanta, a quest many thought improbable until the last few months.

Tuesday, on a 51-35 fifth-ballot vote of the International Olympic Committee in Tokyo, it became a stark, stunning reality. Atlanta, the capital of the New South, is about to become the capital of the new Olympics.

It is no secret that Atlanta earned it the old-fashioned way: with down-home hospitality, complete with violins at nearly every social function, and continuous visits around the world.

It also won the 1996 Games because it is in the Eastern United States. That means a viewer-friendly time zone, which means more television money for the overflowing IOC coffers.

And Atlanta just might have benefited from the subtle support of the National Football League. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said Tuesday at a luncheon with writers and editors at the Washington Post that one reason the league placed the 1994 Super Bowl in Atlanta was to help the Olympics bid.

“It was definitely part of our decision-making process that the Super Bowl would help them,” Tagliabue said. “We spoke with the State Department, and they told us it would be a plus if a major U.S. sports organization gave Atlanta a vote of confidence.”

For the rights to televise the next three Olympics, U.S. networks will pay almost $1 billion. NBC is paying $401 million for the rights to the ’92 Games in Barcelona, Spain. CBS is paying $243 million for the ’92 Winter Games in Albertville, France, and $300 million for the ’94 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway. The IOC receives about 10% of the money.

All of this was not lost on the Atlanta Olympic hopefuls. In Tokyo, Atlanta circulated a brochure with a TV on the cover and trumpeted the possibility of “record revenue sources for the Olympic movement.”

There is no way to estimate how much more money the IOC will reap from holding the Games in Atlanta, but educated guesses are that it could be $100 million more than it would have been had the host city been outside North America. The TV bidding probably will take place in the fall of 1992, after the Barcelona Games.

“I believe the bidding will be considerably in excess of the $300 million of Seoul and the $400 million of Barcelona,” said Robert Wussler, who heads the video entertainment unit of Comsat. “What happened in Los Angeles is ancient history now because there will be so many more opportunities coming out of Atlanta.”

The Games are expected to be an economic windfall for Atlanta. The organizing committee figures that with private sponsorship and prudent management, the Games will turn a profit of $244 million, to be used to support amateur sports programs in Georgia. Another $200 million is expected in government revenues, and officials expect that money to go to programs for education, medical care and the homeless.

Andrew Young, the committee chairman and former mayor, was asked in Tokyo whether American money was the key to the result. “We’ve got an expression in Georgia: ‘That dog won’t hunt,’ ” Young said. “There’s no ground for that question, because after Los Angeles, any Olympics anywhere is going to come out all right financially. The major source of income now is television revenue, and that doesn’t change because the host city is in America.”