S Zebulon Baker, Whatwuzit?: The 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics Reconsidered

This gateway looks back at Atlanta's Olympic Games ten years after the 1996 Opening Ceremony. Many of the links featured have become internet historic sites, not updated since the Olympic flame was extinguished. They establish a lasting reminder of both how news organizations reported the Games and how the Games, as the first Olympics prominently featured on the worldwide web, have been digitally preserved. Featured sections examine the Atlanta Games and the Olympics' engagement with civic, regional and national identities. All illustrations on this gateway were created by Kerry Soper and are taken from the 1996 Southern Changes article, "The Disposable Olympics Meets the City of Hype," by Preston Quesenberry. They help to illustrate sentiments critical of the Games' impact on the Atlanta landscape by highlighting the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games' attempts to "clean up the city" for the Olympics and by the extensive commercialization of the Olympic movement.

If International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Juan Antonio Samaranch's address to the closing ceremonies of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games is remembered at all, it is for his unwillingness to bestow Atlanta's Games with the honor of "the greatest in Olympic history" - that coveted rhetorical flourish lauding the host city's organizing efforts. Unbridled commercialism, poor and unreliable public transportation, a deadly terrorist attack on Centennial Olympic Park: such significant failures shaped Samaranch's verdict that these Olympic Games were "most exceptional," but not "the greatest." His speech, however, gestured toward Atlanta's emerging place on the world stage. "For one hundred years, the Olympic Games have inspired great dreams," he rhapsodized. "Today, the dream has come true for Atlanta, which will forever be an Olympic city."

Samaranch's words were as much a curse as they were a blessing. After all, the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games were an ephemeral moment as much as a transformative mark on the city's landscape: a moment when Atlanta would claim its place on the international stage. This gateway reconsiders this prevailing proposition, exploring how the Games were constructed in popular discourses and how civic boosters' desire for Atlanta's international notoriety was juxtaposed with its history as a southern space.