The people who talked Atlanta into believing it could host the Olympics gathered on July 23 to mark 30 years since it happened — and spent much of the night drawing a line from 1996 to the summer that just ended downtown.
Ambassador Andrew Young, bid committee founder Billy Payne, former mayor Shirley Franklin and others joined Atlanta magazine for a four-course dinner in a private room at Pricci, trading stories from the long-shot campaign that landed the Centennial Games.
“I learned that when you join forces with wonderful friends, you can accomplish the impossible,” Payne said in his toast. Payne was the original engine behind the bid, recruiting city leaders like Young and friends like Charlie Battle into a pitch few outsiders took seriously.
“There’s no way we’re going to beat Athens”
Franklin, who was working in Young’s mayoral office when the bid began, recalled telling her boss exactly what she thought of Atlanta’s chances against the birthplace of the Games.
She remembered his answer: even if we lose, this is good for the city, because it unifies this city around a common cause. But I think we can win.
Among those Payne recruited was George Hirthler, who with Brad Copeland formed the creative team behind the bid. “When Billy Payne hired Brad Copeland and I to be the creative team behind the Olympic bid, he changed both our lives,” Hirthler said. His documentary, The Games in Black and White, traces the Payne and Young partnership. Copeland has since advised every Olympics through PyeongChang in 2018.
The evening ran light as often as it ran reverent. Battle, the bid committee’s director of international relations, had the table laughing over forcing down the heart of a Peking duck during a dinner with an Olympic delegate. Izzy, the widely panned 1996 mascot, took the expected ribbing. “There’s an Izzy costume in my attic,” said Harry Shuman, the bid’s director of public information. “It’s never coming out.”
The line to this summer
The World Cup was in the room all night. Young called Atlanta’s Olympics a religious experience — very spiritual, he told the group — and argued the city would not have landed this summer’s tournament without what was done 30 years ago.
World Cup Host Committee President Dan Corso, fresh off Atlanta’s eight-match run at Mercedes-Benz Stadium and a record-setting Fan Fest at Centennial Olympic Park, made the same case from the other direction in his toast: the city could say it would host the World Cup only because of what everyone in that room did in 1996.
The proof is a few blocks of downtown. Centennial Olympic Park, built as the Games’ gathering place, was the Fan Fest site this summer. The venues, the park and the habit of hosting all trace back to a bid that started as an improbable idea.
Reporting by Allison Entrekin for Atlanta magazine; photograph by Kerri Phox. Read the original: Major Figures from the 1996 Olympics Gather to Celebrate the Games’ 30th Anniversary.
