The Centennial Summer Olympic Games opened on the evening of Friday, July 19, 1996, at Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Stadium (now Turner Field). Throughout the two weeks between the Opening and Closing Ceremonies on Sunday, August 4, the place and purpose of this patently international gathering was juxtaposed to the corporate and regional identities of Atlanta itself in the coverage of the national and international media. The festivities of the Opening Ceremonies, reported Jere Longman of the New York Times, were designed by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) as both "an extravagant pageant to honor 100 years of the modern Games" and an evocation of "the hospitable, not to mention corporate, spirit of the modern American South."

Soper's illustration highlights The World of Coca-Cola and Underground Atlanta, two attempts to revitalize Atlanta's downtown through tourism that were made concurrently with Atlanta's bid for the 1996 games.

Underground Atlanta History and Future World of Coca-Cola

While the attention of the international community may have been fixed on the celebration at Centennial Olympic Stadium, John Crumpacker of the San Francisco Examiner watched the Opening Ceremonies from a Hooters restaurant in Jonesboro, a blues club in the Virginia Highlands, and an African American strip club — all the while noticing that "non-Olympic Atlanta went about its business scarcely touched by what was happening at ground zero of a global viewing audience." "From redneck Jonesboro to the south to the black urban core of Atlanta," he wrote, "people ate, danced and drank with minimal interest in the Opening Ceremonies of the 1996 Olympic Games." While he acknowledged that "Georgia tried to outdo its reputation for Southern hospitality," Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post nevertheless eschewed the conventional region-based reading of these Games when judging them "not really the Atlanta Games so much as . . . the American Olympics — the first true one, with the whole world aboard, since 1924. As such, it celebrated our diversity and hospitality, our gauchery and our generosity, our isolated lunatics and our general decency. The world saw our passion for excellence and our penchant for every excess."

But Atlanta's profile as the largest urban center in the American South could not be sidestepped. "The Games pose the question about just which image is closer to the real South," Peter Applebome of the New York Times noted, "the exuberant show of interracial regional harmony and shared Southern culture that 3.5 billion viewers across the world saw Friday night or the escalating controversies over the Confederate battle flag and antebellum history that increasingly divide white and black Southerners?" Attention to such contrasts was hardly unique. Throughout the two-week media blitz, the Games were portrayed as a contest between competing urges played out across Atlanta's urban and cultural landscape - the South's Confederate past versus a desire to portray the present-day South as a land of multiracial social progress, the regional identity versus a national one, the national interest versus the international, amateur athletes versus professional ones, the integrity of the Olympic Movement's amateur competition versus the tawdriness of ACOG's commercial endorsements.

Five days before the Games opened, George Vescey of the New York Times surveyed Centennial Olympic Park, the enduring monument to these Olympics and the renewal projects which reconfigured the urban landscape of the city. "Centennial Park seemed to be a jumble of metal and stone," he reported, "plastic and neon, an old pecan tree and a few patches of grass, chain-link fence and tarps on the edges, tents and signs bearing the names of corporate sponsors — particularly Coca-Cola, the tooth-rotting dark sugar water that is such a major portion of the world's diet and Atlanta's income. Stuckey's. That's what it reminds me of, the old chain of stores that sprung up alongside the highways, where you could get gas, buy a hot dog and candy plus stock up on concrete lawn statues and souvenir mugs and gaudy T-shirts."
(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/specials/olympics/cntdown/0714oly-run-mitchell.html)

In the entry for July 23, 1996, in his daily "'Packer's Journal" written for the San Francisco Examiner, Crumpacker described for his readers the overabundance of vendors throughout downtown Atlanta. "Imagine the Placer County Fair plopped down into the Olympic core of Atlanta. That's what downtown looks like as every imaginable open space is filled by vendors of every stripe. Temporary tattoos? They got 'em. Fake gold medals? Yours, if you swallow your dignity as a human being. Goofy food? Yours for the noshing. There's Australian bull riding, an ersatz NASA space center ( "Atlanta, we have a problem" ), a store devoted entirely to Hakeem Olajuwon products, whatever they may be, a booth called the Reggae Posse, and enough T-shirts to clothe Swaziland. The centerpiece of all this American schlock is a giant bungee jumping contraption. Victims sit strapped in a chair and are flung skyward by cords on either side of the seat. Recommended preparation: eight beers and a basket of cheese fries."
(Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/examiner/article.cgi?year=1996&month=07&day=23&article=SPORTS5229.dtl)

Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post commented that his lasting memory of the Atlanta Games would be "inflatable beer cans." "When I close my eyes and picture Atlanta, I see a giant Miller Lite can or a giant Bud can-even better, Gumby, 80 feet high! And I'll hear the familiar strains of 'Macarena' wafting from the beer gardens (and I say familiar because they played the blasted song 400 times every night at decibel levels loud enough to wake Franco, and now 15 times a day, like a nervous twitch, I find myself spontaneously shouting, 'Heeeeyyyy, macarena!') [. . .] And I'll reflect on the 450-pound vendors nesting in the lower lobby of our comfy hotel, drawn upstairs by the smell of bacon. And the crush of people in Centennial Park waiting in line in the heat for hours to get into 'The Super Store,' a schlockery where you can buy the same official Olympic merchandise you can buy in the Kansas City airport. Speaking of Centennial Park, there is a statue there of Baron de Coubertin. He is facing 'Bud World' and 'Coca-Cola City,' and the look on his face indicates that if he'd known what the Olympics would turn into, he'd have bought Anheuser-Busch and Coke stock."
(Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/sports/olympics/daily/aug/05/tk5.htm)

"Despite the picture that sometimes emerged of Atlanta as a city of quick-buck hucksters," wrote Applebome, "it also takes seriously its civil rights legacy, history of overcoming adversity and sense of being at the heart of a renascent South." The Games were, in his estimation, "a remarkable pageant of interracial unity in a nation racked by racial division."
(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/specials/olympics/0805/oly-atlanta-image.html)

Southern humorist and Atlanta native Roy Blount, Jr., returned home for the Games as a roving observer for Sports Illustrated. In his first dispatch, Blount considers the city's homeless population in relation to Five Points, "an area that lies just to the southeast of the Olympic Center but squarely in the middle of Atlanta history": "Five Points is an area that many suburban whites have long been loath to venture into. Now the Olympics have brought the area back into focus. City, state and private security forces are everywhere, abandoned buildings have been gussied up and pressed into service, and $5 million has been plowed into making a showpiece out of Woodruff Park, a patch of green right at Five Points' heart. What do you know? Famously amorphous Atlanta does have a central core of street life."
(Source: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/events/1996/olympics/weekly/960729/atlanta.html)

In his second and final dispatch, Blount meditated on the ever-increasing connections between Atlanta and the international community into whose consciousness it so wanted to be injected.
Source: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/events/1996/olympics/weekly/960805/burkfaso.html)