On January 30, 2023, organizers announced the inaugural adidas Atlanta City Games — a free, international track and field meet scheduled for May 6, 2023, at Centennial Olympic Park. The event would bring world-class athletics back to the site where the 1996 Olympic Games had showcased the sport to a global audience, and the headliner matched the ambition: Noah Lyles, three-time world champion and Olympic bronze medalist, who said he was chasing a world record in the 150 meters.
"We need to go to where the people are," Lyles said when announcing his participation. "Atlanta is going to be a great place to do that."
The Competition
The meet featured a compact, spectator-friendly program: 100-meter and 150-meter sprints, 100-meter and 110-meter hurdles, and a pole vault competition. A 600-meter road race and the adidas Running City Mile — open to the public in age-group waves, with both in-person and virtual registration — extended the event beyond elite competition into community participation.
The format reflected a broader movement in track and field to bring competition out of stadiums and into public spaces where casual fans can experience it. Street meets in major cities — modeled on the European tradition of bringing athletics into city centers — had been gaining momentum, and Atlanta's version had a built-in advantage: a venue whose very name evoked the Olympic tradition.
Atlanta's Track Legacy
Rich Kenah, CEO of the Atlanta Track Club, framed the event in terms of the city's athletic history. Atlanta is home to Olympic gold medalists Edwin Moses, Gail Devers, and Dwight Phillips — names that span three decades of American dominance in track and field. The 1996 Olympics themselves had produced iconic moments at venues that still stand in downtown Atlanta, including the track at what became Georgia State University's campus.
The adidas Atlanta City Games positioned Centennial Olympic Park not as a historical monument but as a living venue — a place where the next generation of track and field stars could compete on ground that had hosted the Games twenty-seven years earlier. For a park that most visitors experience as a tourist attraction and event space, the meet was a reminder of why it was built in the first place.
The event was free and open to all fans, with live streaming available on the adidas YouTube channel — ensuring that the meet's reach extended beyond the thousands who would line Centennial Olympic Park Drive to watch Noah Lyles sprint through the heart of downtown Atlanta.
Original reporting by Georgia Public Broadcasting, January 30, 2023.