Atlanta Wages Winning Effort : Olympics: City ahead of schedule for ’96 Games and expects long-term payoffs from all-inclusive planning.

Former U.N. Ambassador and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young painted a rosy portrait of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, saying Los Angeles’ experience taught that the event “could be done as a private-sector project rather than a government project.”

And he predicted the Games will work to the long-term good of Atlanta because civic leaders have included all segments of the city in the Olympic planning process.

“In fact, it was the inclusiveness of our bid and our sort of affirmative action way in Atlanta that got us the Olympics in the first place,” he said in a wide-ranging interview with reporters and editors at The Times’ Washington bureau on Thursday.

In part because of competitive bidding for rights to construction projects and licensing agreements, the organizers have a positive balance sheet and are ahead of schedule on construction of sports facilities in and around the city, Young said. He said Olympic organizers have raised more than $1 billion from sponsors.

“We expect to raise about $1.6 billion and expect to spend a little bit less than that,” he said. “Up to now, we’re ahead of our fund-raising projections and we’re behind in our spending projections. And so, it’s paying for itself, and people who are interested in the Olympics are buying the things at about twice the rate that we anticipated. It looks like unless we have a complete bust in ticket sales, we’ll go comfortably over our margin.”

Young said the organizing committee expects almost 200 nations and as many as 20,000 athletes to participate in the Games. In addition, he said, 50,000 journalists are expected to cover the event.

Hoping to ensure the safety of Olympic participants, Young said organizers will call for a suspension of hostilities among nations of the world during the Games.

“We’re going to work actively in the next few years to try to get everybody to stop fighting during the period of the Olympics and observe the traditional truce that went along with the original Olympic Games,” he said, adding that organizers are working with UNICEF and CARE to promote the truce.

Organizers of the Atlanta Games sought participation from every racial, ethnic and demographic group in the city, Young said. As an example of that inclusiveness, “we made a special effort for companies owned by women as single heads of households” to participate.

It was during the waning years of his second mayoral term that Young proposed that Atlanta host the 1996 Summer Olympics--an idea that met with skepticism from many in the nation and the city.

Now, only two years remain before the Olympic flame burns in Atlanta.

“Barring any major international incident, we’ll have a successful, peaceful and profitable Olympics,” he said.