The Bittersweet End

Disheartened that International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch would vary from his standard closing ceremonies remarks Sunday night by declining to call the 1996 Summer Olympics “the best Games ever,” the president of Atlanta’s organizing committee made the declaration for him.

“From the perspective of the community that hosted the Games, the visitors who attended the Games, the athletes who performed at the Games, I think we have achieved our goal,” said Billy Payne, who had vowed to organize the largest peacetime event ever and the best Olympics in the 100-year history of the modern Games.

Yet, Payne was struggling Sunday to be heard above criticism from IOC members and other longtime observers of the Olympic movement.

Most agreed that the Games, with few exceptions, were excellent for athletes and spectators and praised the revival of the Olympic spirit in the city after the bombing at Centennial Olympic Park in the early hours of June 27 that left two dead and 111 injured.

But they were perplexed about transportation and technology problems never fully solved by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games and expressed concern about the direction these Games have taken the movement in dealing with commercialism and size.

And unlike Atlanta officials after the Summer Olympics four years ago in Barcelona, organizers of future Games--Nagano, Japan, and Salt Lake City for the winters of 1998 and 2002 and Sydney, Australia, for the summer of 2000--were going home today having learned less about what to do than what not to do.

In his speech during the closing ceremonies before a capacity crowd in Centennial Olympic Stadium, Samaranch did not use the words “best Games ever,” as he has in the previous seven Games he has presided over since 1984. He opened with a tentative, “Well done, Atlanta,” although he later was more enthusiastic in calling the city’s effort “most exceptional.”

But the former Spanish ambassador to the Soviet Union was less diplomatic in an interview with a German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag.

“I don’t want to say that in Atlanta they were not doing the best they could for us, but perhaps it could have been better,” he said. “Many things in Atlanta went well, but there are many things that we must improve or change.”

Anita DeFrantz, an IOC executive board member from Los Angeles, acknowledged that her colleagues were disappointed with aspects of the Games, but said Atlanta might not have been judged as objectively as past Olympic cities because it promised so much in its campaign to win the bid six years ago for the Centennial Games over sentimental favorite Athens, Greece.

“They raised the level of expectations so high that I’m not sure anyone could have met those expectations,” she said. “It became very easy to find fault when they didn’t meet them.”

Atlanta received unanimous praise from members, she said, for its response to the bombing on the eighth night of the Games. The downtown park created as a gathering place for those who wanted to experience the Olympic atmosphere was closed for three days while law enforcement agencies scoured the crime scene. Then it reopened with a tasteful and moving memorial service and soon was attracting even larger crowds than before.

Asked if he believes the memory of Atlanta’s Games will be marred by the bombing, Payne said: “No, I think Atlanta will be remembered for the way we charged back into the park, reclaimed it, put a stake in the ground. We bounced back even stronger than before, even while we carried in our hearts a loss for the families of the victims.”

ACOG also received high marks for its primary function, organizing athletic contests. Competing for the most part in state-of-the-art venues that DeFrantz said were “spectacular, absolutely spectacular,” numerous world, national and Olympic records were set as an unprecedented number of countries won medals.

The athletes in general were pleased, not only with the competition sites but the villages that housed them.

“I had a blast,” said Simi Valley archer Justin Huish, who won two gold medals.

It was a daunting task for the organizing committee. Involved were so many more athletes (almost 11,000) from so many more countries (197) with so many more spectators (9 million tickets sold) than ever before that Payne referred to it as “2 1/2 Olympic Games.”

But Payne admitted that the organizing committee, the city and even the Olympic movement might have been “victims of our success” because Atlanta’s infrastructure, particularly the transportation system, was overwhelmed.

ACOG had enough difficulty transporting athletes, officials and media. Buses, particularly those borrowed from other cities, often broke down. Some drivers, also imported, were unfamiliar with Atlanta’s streets and freeways. Many quit in frustration.

There were more headaches for spectators, who discovered they could not rely on a rapid transit system, MARTA, that was asked to carry about 1.5 million passengers a day, about 1 million more than normal.

The technology of producing results of sports competitions quickly for the media also proved beyond ACOG’s corporate partners from IBM and Bell South. A less sophisticated backup system was called upon in the second week, belying the organizers’ claims that these would be known as the “Technology Games.”

DeFrantz said U.S. cities bidding for future Olympics will face more of a challenge because of Atlanta’s shortcomings.

“I don’t think anybody is going to be able to go before the IOC and say, ‘Gosh, golly, we can do this because we’re a big American city,’ ” she said. “They’re going to have to be very specific in how they expect to implement their plans.”

Richard Pound, an IOC vice president from Canada, said all host cities in the future, including those from the United States, will be required to operate in concert with city, regional or federal governments because of the experience in Atlanta.

“I don’t like the Olympic Games organized by a private firm as they were in Atlanta,” Samaranch told Welt am Sonntag.

Largely a privately funded organization, ACOG expects to break even or show a small profit after meeting its $1.7-billion operating budget. But it had little extra money to solve problems in areas such as transportation and technology that it knew as early as a year ago could arise.

Dr. LeRoy Walker, a member of ACOG’s senior staff until he became president of the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1992, said the organizing committee was larger than necessary. At the end, ACOG had 4,000 employees, more than three times the number who worked for the Los Angeles organizing committee in 1984.

“Like Everitt Dirksen used to say about the government, ‘You spend a million here and a million there, and, suddenly, you’re talking about serious money,’ ” Walker said.

But no matter how thrifty the organizing committee, raising enough money to stage the Summer Olympics is an expensive undertaking. Sydney organizers said their budget will be about the same as Atlanta’s but they also are counting on an additional $1.2 billion from the state government of New South Wales.

As the Games increase in scope and size, corporate sponsors are more necessary to defray costs. That has created a delicate situation for a movement that prefers to advertise its idealism.

IOC officials do not want to offend their corporate benefactors, especially those that paid $40 million for their association with the official Olympic rings, but they would like to see less gaudy displays of the sponsors’ logos in the future than in Atlanta.

Some IOC members complain that exhibits such as Coca-Cola Olympic City and BudWorld have detracted from the ambience, as have the hundreds of vendors in tents licensed by the city of Atlanta to operate on street corners that created a carnival atmosphere.

“Sports has to take the priority, not marketing as has been the case here in Atlanta,” Samaranch said in a Sunday news conference before the closing ceremonies, where the Olympic flag was passed to Sydney.

* SAMARANCH’S DIPLOMACY: As expected, the IOC’s president withheld high praise of the Atlanta Games, calling them “most exceptional.” A1