Hosting the World

A relocated Dunwoody accountant from New York told me recently that it was rare to run into a truly native Atlantan. His questions about how it felt to be surrounded by so many transplanted Northerners caught me off guard. According to his theory, the city has been invaded by modern carpetbagger Northerners who are directing a sort of latter-day Reconstruction of Atlanta, the capital of the New South rising out of the ashes not just as a phoenix, but as an Olympic star, triumphantly endorsed by the international community.

He was wrong. This is my Olympics. It started for me one fall morning in tenth grade as a group of students and I clustered around an old radio. Never mind that the bell signaling homeroom had already rung. We had determined which teacher had radios or televisions in their rooms since at the beginning of the week. Now we were installed in those rooms where we could hear the announcement. As the time drew closer, those students who had not made it into the building were opting to sit outside in their cars alone or with their carpools or parents. From the window of the second-story classroom where I was standing, I could see their cars resting at a standstill as if it were rush hour.

In a few moments, the long-awaited decision would be announced halfway around the world and Atlanta would finally know the result of its bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. People were placing bets as if we were at a horse race. "Athens has it for sure-it's the Centennial," some were arguing. They were rebutted with comments about Toronto's milder climate and the fact that it was just too soon after Los Angeles for any American city to have any kind of decent odds. Only a few voiced the opinion that we should win. Besides the fact that many of us believed our hometown was a long shot, betting on Atlanta was like guessing what the large wrapped package that your aunt and uncle had handed you when they got to your birthday party contained: You were reluctant to guess because it just might be exactly what you had been wanting.

So we waited. Suddenly the small talk dwindled and we leaned in closer, focusing on the voice coming from the radio in our midst.

When Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee announced "The city of....Atlanta!", he did not simply change the way natives had traditionally pronounced the name of their city, softening the first "t" and practically leaving out the second. In that moment, as those of us clustered around radios and televisions simultaneously let out our breaths in gasps of disbelief and anticipation and those sitting in their cars outside started honking in celebration, the "city of Aht-LAHN-ta" left the starting block as if a gun had been fired.

At the headquarters of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG), this race is measured in how many hours until the Opening Ceremonies. Since Day 1,000, a large digital clock fixed to the Spring Street overpass has similarly kept track of the count for natives, visitors and folks just passing through town. In Atlanta, time is no longer measured in any customary fashion such as weekdays and weekends; months and years have coalesced into a linear countdown. The Olympic calendar measures time only in terms of Olympic Central Time-how many days are left.

For many Atlantans, hosting the Olympics has made what had always been a captivating world event a daily activity. Mary Ann Siegel, ACOG's official envoi to the small Pacific island country of Nauru, was involved in the bidding process from the beginning. "I had always been fascinated by the Olympics," says Siegel who traveled with Andrew Young, former Atlanta mayor, during the bidding process.

She was naturally interested in taking an even greater part in the volunteer effort once that bid proved successful. For Siegel the scope of the Atlanta Games extends well beyond the 17 days of actual competition. She began training for her position two years ago. "It's here, it's now," she says just days after the official opening of the Olympic village. "We won't be measured by the Games alone. We must ask how we are going to build on the Games."

The words "responsibility," "ownership," and "community" are the cornerstones of ACOG's official vocabulary and rhetoric. They are used to enshrine the Olympic experience as the best thing to ever happen to Atlanta. "Legacy" is one of the most positive words employed to emphasize the expected enduring benefit of the Games. No one can deny the advantages of the strengthened infrastructure, the showcasing of the Atlanta art circuit as a result of the Cultural Olympiad or the exposure to other cultures and nationalities that comes with hosting what Atlanta Journal and Constitution columnist Betty Parham called a "four-year traveling roadshow, the largest peacetime gathering on earth."

Behind the rhetoric lies an urban planning nightmare, though. Those people living within the Olympic ring-the concentrated downtown area where a number of events will take place-have received official instruction books from the city detailing how they can best prepare for the crowds and changes forecasted to result from the Games. From strongly recommended "tips" on taking care of the necessities-such as doing three weeks of dry cleaning and grocery shopping before the torch ever lights up the cauldron-to policies that give them limited access to their own streets, these residents are being told how they can and cannot conduct their lives.

More than any other factor, citizens of the Olympic city are most worried about the logistics of getting around the city during the 17 days of Olympic competition. Faced with many street and interstate exit closings and limited access to parking lots, many businesses have developed alternate employee policies and hours for the duration of the Games. As a result of these restrictions and inconveniences, plenty of Atlantans do not want to have any part of the actual Olympics. They are leaving their homes -whether they have been rented out for a mythically large sum of money or not-and are taking extended vacations. Others would like to leave, but must stay here because of the restraints of their specific type employment.

"They can't come and go soon enough," Sgt. L. Johnson of the Atlanta Police Department says referring to the Games. He anticipates crowds in his normally calm beat just blocks away from the Olympic Village. "Our already extended 12-hour shifts are going to be more like 13 or 14 with all the busing," he adds.

For the most part, city workers, ACOG staff and volunteers have been working around the clock to finish preparing and will continue to do so throughout the Games. "I feel the same way as Andy Young," says Siegel. "As he said, 'it's bigger than I am, I can't control it, but it helps us come together and work together.' It is the most amazing example of teamwork that I have ever seen."

Who is a part of that team? Looming like Mount Olympus did over the Greek world, ACOG has dominated the direction of the Games since the IOC's announcement in Tokyo. Its Mount Olympus is a massive downtown building that serves as the Atlanta hub for many corporations in the technology and communications industries behind its reflective, faintly green glass-mirrored facade. Those working for ACOG express their admiration for an organization that has driven an impossible task through inept government agencies, around old-guard business prerogatives and over uncaring suburban blight. It would be wrong to say that ACOG is responsible for all of the commercialism surrounding the Games and has not aided the development of dialogues among Atlanta's different social and economic communities.

Still many in Atlanta feel alienated by ACOG and its decisions regarding certain regulations.

A reader of The Atlanta Journal and Constitution recently referred to the "ACOG Games" rather than the Olympic Games when he wrote in to protest one of ACOG's regulations that have been established for attending actual competition. Many feel an element of heavy-handedness in ACOG's rules. The recommendations often sound more like corporate directives rather than well-meant advice and community support. So much so that the organization has become as much of a Big Brother in terms of regulating every detail of Atlanta's daily functions than in providing community outreach.

This organization, which claimed to be providing the "most accessible" Games in history, established an advance ticket purchasing lottery that was so complicated, I put it off until the last possible moment because I did not understand how it worked-even after reading the directions several times. One can only imagine that it was similarly impossible for a large segment of our population, particularly anyone who is illiterate or only semi-literate. And then there is the case of a mother who discovered months after purchasing tickets for herself and her two young children that among the myriad number of objects that ACOG will not allow to be brought into any venue is a stroller. Not even the kind that folds up and can fit under a spectator's seat. She must find some other way of getting her children from the remote parking sites to the competition venue.

Among the most significant and telling changes that ACOG has made in its policy concerns the original mandate that all applicants for Olympic volunteer positions must demonstrate a history of volunteer service before being considered. In the months just before the Games, when ACOG found itself scrambling for workers, they started screening applications primarily based on the criteria of availability and age. What was initially an endorsement of support for permanent community service was replaced by a scramble to meet the needs of a multi-billion dollar undertaking.

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution has installed a special Olympic section of its "Vent" column where readers call, fax or write in personal comments regarding the city or life in general. In a recent edition of "'96 Vent," a reader asked, "...How do you spell Atlanta? A-V-A-R-I-C-E. To those without a dictionary, it's G-R-E-E-D-Y." And Charles Jackson, who owns a car-repair lot two blocks away from the new Olympic stadium says, "ACOG wants all the money for itself." The street where his shop is located will be closed preventing his opening for normal business. There is no recompense for this closing; and the contract that he received requesting that ACOG use his parking lot for employee parking during the Games seemed useless because no one from ACOG ever followed through with him.

In many ways, our experience in Atlanta is replay of the old struggle of the individual to realize a dream. The story of one average real estate lawyer's hard work and sacrifice is the party line behind Atlanta's successful bid for the Games. Billy Payne's struggle corresponds directly to the emotion of the Olympic dream and plays like a feel-good documentary. "I am not sure that most people in Atlanta know or understand the structure of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games," Siegel says. "But, I think they are fascinated by Billy Payne, by his charisma, his mystique, his dream."

But in the southern nature of this place, this city, the Games' arrival illuminates a continuing chasm between those with buying and selling power and those who have it not. Even Payne has been dubbed "King Billy," and received a salary of $669,000, making him the highest paid executive of a non-profit organization in the country. Athletes from around the world enjoy state of the art entertainment and leisure systems, have access to the Internet and live in suite dormitories complete with microwaves and refrigerators, while apartments and housing projects that we don't want the world to see are bulldozed.

One's first inclination might be to cite poor race relations, or worse still, racism as the discrimnating characteristic between those who see themselves as team-members and those who stand on the outside. Especially after a drive down the streets of the poor black neighborhoods south of the Olympic stadium where Charles Jackson and others like him live. An irony strikes one immediately: As the residents mill around in the middle of the day with no work to do and no where to go, Visa's welcoming banners-which line the streetlights' poles-blow above their heads.

But Atlanta has met the opportunity of playing host to the 23rd Olympiad with its characteristic dual reaction to anything. This reaction is split along north-south neighborhood lines and seems based on bank account sizes. The town that marketed itself as a city "Too busy to hate" in its bid to host the Games may be experiencing a self-fulfilling prophecy. Atlanta may be too busy racing to complete the sacred preparations to admit that its self-image as the modern success story of the civil rights era projected during the bidding process is somewhat fractured. On the surface race relations appear to be more cohesive than most places in the South as those on top, both black and white, work together in a partnership that has sometimes been referred to as the "Atlanta Way." The situation appears to be calm, however, only because they rely on a coalition forged by two strong race-differentiated hierarchies that understand the benefits of working together.

Behind this image of harmonious teamwork, Atlanta hides its not-so-innocent history in the civil rights movement and its seat as the capital of a region where black churches were recently burned at a rate of almost one per day for weeks. No one knows this better than those of us who are natives. "I was born and raised on Co-cola," is my usual answer when someone asks me where I am from. I say it like they say it in the rural South and even in some classic Atlanta institutions like the Varsity.

Yet even as I answer, I feel a certain twinge of the angst that afflicts scores of self-conscious liberal Southerners who grew up in a land of stereotypes, part of the majority which oppressively enslaved, and then segregated, a minority on account of its skin color. In the back of my mind, I know that the person who probably taught me to say "Co-cola" was a 70-year-old black woman who stayed with my sister and me after she retired from the janitorial staff at Citizens & Southern Bank.

On a broader scale, every time I say "Co-cola" I remember that this same company continued sales to South Africa during Apartheid, and many blacks and whites alike boycotted its products in protest. Now the company stands as a cornerstone-if not the keystone-of the corporate Olympic sponsors? Several venues as well as the Olympic village actually lie at the feet of the skyscraper whose red logo shines out over the Atlanta skies like an advertisement or a brand.

Underneath this recognizable beacon which is more recognizable to the world than even the Olympic rings, Atlanta bleeds the dark brown syrup of her financial lifeline. In a town so dependent on a marketing giant, crafting and selling an image is paramount. Because these are the first privately funded Olympics in modern history, the margin for loss and gain is huge. As Coca-Cola sponsors-and even the city itself-battle to turn a profit, Atlanta's self-image has been streamlined to coincide with the commercials and advertisements that have flooded the city's billboards, newspapers and radio and television channels.

We have tried so hard for so long, that we want our execution of the Games to be flawless. "You commit yourself to something wonderful, but you don't know where it's going," Siegel says, describing her experience as one of many volunteers. As for her dedication to the rigors of a two-year training program whose culmination demanded 24-hour duties long before the Opening Ceremonies, Siegel says it comes from the knowledge that "you are making the product better." Siegel's words illustrate the subtle, sales-oriented attitude that Atlanta has developed. In preparing to host the world's party we have been seduced by commercialism.

Perhaps the real fear lurking behind the much discussed and widespread concern that we may not be ready in time, however, is that under the scrutinizing gaze and sophisticated eyes of the international community, we are going to be discovered scampering around the yard barefoot, despite our Sunday best, while the servants, wearing white gloves to conceal their dark-skinned hands, serve iced tea from silver trays.

As the Games come and go, the first question Atlantans-and in turn all Southerners and Americans-must ask themselves is why is our mascot a computer-generated cartoon with so few distinguishing and inspiring characteristics, rather than a symbol which we can take pride in? Also, what is it that we are hiding behind the row of new, sterile suburban-style homes built between the stadium and the poor neighborhoods to the south and east? These are questions that the world community which we have invited to our city has the right to ask of us and probably will. In pursuing the answer, one is confronted with the realization that the Olympic spirit is not something that a city can host nor a sponsor produce, no matter how many tear-jerking advertisements McDonald's or Coke's advertising teams can orchestrate. Nor is it something that can be regulated by what color and size newspaper distributors are or where parking lots are situated.

"It's been an evolution from one person's dream to a city's responsibility," Siegel says about Atlanta's experience of hosting the Games.

In the end, Atlantans must hope that this evolution reverses itself, that dreams still exist unfettered by the bottom line of a budget or the commercialism of corporate sponsors. That as we host the world's two-and-a-half week celebration, we don't forget to bring our true selves.