Center StageFinally the focus of the Centennial games shifts from the city of Atlanta to the athletesby Tim Layden
The message became clouded through all the years, months, weeks and days of counting down toward Atlanta '96. To whom do these Olympic Games belong? Are they the personal province of Billy Payne, the Atlanta lawyer who brought them to this unlikely place? Are they the property of Atlanta itself, which at last has a meaningful title—Home of the 1996 Olympics—that may stick? Do they belong to the wealthy corporations that are underwriting their renewal? Can they be stolen by fear when a flaming airplane falls from the sky so close to their beginning?
At the Olympics, archery is one of the minor sports that draws more than its target audience.
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Tonight a torch will be ignited in a kaleidoscopic cauldron at the north end of Olympic Stadium. Athletes—a record 11,000 of them from a record 197 countries—will march together, bearing flags. A solemn oath will be taken. The opening ceremonies of an Olympic Games are quite unlike any other event on the planet, fairly bursting with emotions shared among people as diverse as the earth itself, people filled with hope, with fear, with celebration upon their very arrival on such a grand stage. "You eat, sleep and drink your goal, and then you're there and it's an incredible feeling," says Evelyn Ashford, the 100-meter gold medalist in 1984, who ran in three Olympics all told.
"You walk into the stadium, and that's the melting point," says U.S. volleyball team captain Bob Ctvrtlik, who is competing in his third Olympics. "All the other things that you've been dealing with—your wife and tickets and all of that—is gone. You can finally focus on the competition, what it is that you're here to do." So at last the message becomes blessedly simple: Tonight is when the Olympics are passed into the hands of the athletes.
It will be a joyous passage too. When there are not yet events to lift us, we find something else to evaluate. So in the past four years more has been written and broadcast about grits, Coca-Cola, Gone With the Wind and Andrew Young than ever needed to be known. It has been suggested that no city whose primary Olympic crossroads is an intersection that has both a Planet Hollywood and a Hard Rock Cafe (check it out: Peachtree Street and International Boulevard, right in the middle of downtown) deserves the bouquet of the Games. It has been feared that the Olympic movement will be stained by its southern hosts. And it has been asked, again and again and again: Is Atlanta ready for the Olympics?
The answer is: It doesn't matter anymore what Atlanta is, was or wishes to be, or how much money Budweiser (or Sports Illustrated) has pumped into these Games for its own needs. It isn't important how much is being charged for a hotel room in Buckhead or a taxi from the airport. In the next 16 days and nights, the athletes of the world will render meaningless the chatter that preceded these Games. They will make Atlanta what any host city is meant to be: a backdrop, the scenery against which the Games unfold. It can be as timeless and breathtakingly beautiful as Norway in winter or as rushed as the sod and concrete of Centennial Olympic Park. Ultimately the surroundings become inconsequential, to be remembered only vaguely, like the decor of the hospital room in which a child is born.
Lake Placid was far too small and the transportation system was a disaster, yet we see in our minds Mike Eruzione tossing a wrist shot past a Soviet goalie, and Jim Craig wrapped in the flag. Los Angeles was big enough to swallow the Games like another Oscar night, but we remember Mary Lou Retton's vault and Joan Benoit's marathon. It was too warm in Albertville, but there was speed skater Bonnie Blair, assuring us that it was winter by winning two gold medals. History has taught us that the Games are far larger than a city's or a country's influence or legacy. It has taught us too that Olympic achievement cannot be erased by the most trying human drama, by controversy or by tragedy. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black gloves into the Mexico City evening, but who can forget Bob Beamon and Bill Toomey? Eleven Israeli athletes were slaughtered in Munich and their memory lives forever, but so do the images of Frank Shorter, Mark Spitz and the inconceivable defeat of the U.S. men's basketball team, a loss that ultimately brought the NBA and IOC together.
A great sporting moment is a snapshot, left to travel in the mind, always alive. Here is Michael Jordan, floating to the basket; there is Joe Montana, saving a game. Muhammad Ali, blowing kisses. The Olympics are no different. We remember Nadia Comaneci scoring perfect 10s in 1976 and Carl Lewis exulting after each of his four gold medals in '84. The images are as fresh as life on a summer evening. It is 1988, and the sound of Greg Louganis's head smacking the diving board is as jarring as this morning's alarm. It is 1992, and there is Magic, Larry, Charles....
The Olympics strike an emotional chord like few events in mainstream sport, sometimes in places where we would never have known to look. In '84 superheavyweight Greco-Roman wrestler Jeff Blatnick, who had undergone treatment for Hodgkin's disease, won a gold medal and wept like a baby. In '94 Dan Jansen finally won the speed skating gold that had so sadly eluded him in two previous Olympics, and then he skated a slow lap with his infant child, Janie, and pointed toward the heavens in memory of his sister, Jane, who had died the morning of his first attempt, six years earlier.
All of these images live, as brightly as the day they happened and long after the memory of Calgary or Seoul or Barcelona or Lillehammer itself has melted away. So think not of these Atlanta Games as a quest for bottled springwater and air conditioning but as a canvas on which the colors of the Games are splashed, leaving their legacy.
It is easy sometimes to know where to look: into the cold, professional eyes of sprinter Michael Johnson, who is favored to become the first man in history to win both the 200- and 400-meter races in one Olympics. Or at the squat, powerful form of Turkish weightlifter Naim Suleymanoglu, who will be seeking his third consecutive gold medal in the 141-pound division. Or at the effortless strokes of Janet Evans, who will attempt to win the 800-meter freestyle and become the first U.S. female swimmer to win the same event in three consecutive Olympics.
The Games give us a fresh forum in which to view the likes of Monica Seles, Karch Kiraly and, of course, Shaquille O'Neal, Penny Hardaway and Grant Hill, all of whom are as ubiquitous on our TV sets as Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer, and all of whom have made the appealing choice to play only for the medal and not the money. At least not directly. The Olympics offer the chance to bid farewell to Lewis, who can win his ninth gold medal, matching a record held by Spitz, Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina and Finnish distance runner Paavo Nurmi. Or we may be saying goodbye to Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who in her quest to win a third gold in the heptathlon is confronted by the dual ravages of age (she is 34) and a youthful foe, 22-year-old Ghada Shouaa of Syria, who is frightfully better each time she competes. The Olympics frame rivalries, like that of Gary Hall Jr. of the U.S. and Aleksandr Popov of Russia, two sleek free spirits who will be matched again in the quicksilver 50- and 100-meter freestyle swimming events.
But the most compelling essence of the Games is not the predictable greatness, the Dream Teams or the bittersweet goodbyes. It is the discovery of a champion otherwise lost in a sport that springs to life only at an Olympics. It is waking one morning without a basketball ticket and settling, instead, for a minor sport. In the absence of superstars in familiar arenas, you perhaps witness British rowers Steven Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent, who are favored to win the gold medal in the pairs without cox in Atlanta. (A victory would give Redgrave a gold medal in four consecutive Olympics, a rarefied place in history). Or maybe you wind up watching superheavyweight Greco-Roman wrestler Aleksandr Karelin of Russia, who seems to embrace the violence in his work and is surely the most intimidating presence at these Games.
There is a rare chance at the Olympics to comprehend and appreciate an athletic feat that might otherwise be skimmed over in antiseptic print. It is one thing to read in the small type of a newspaper that Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie has broken the world records for both the 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs, but it is quite another to see him circling the burnt-orange track at a pace approaching four minutes per mile for 121Ž2 laps in the 5K and at less than 4:20 per mile for 25 laps of the 10K—a rate that, upon close examination, appears very much like that of a common man in an all-out sprint.
Unseen, a sport like team handball sounds oddly misplaced. The Olympic version is a blur, like indoor soccer played with the hands. Badminton and table tennis bear little resemblance to the games on summer lawns and in basement rec rooms, respectively; instead, they are too fast for the untrained eye. Water polo is sedate on the surface, relentless and violent below it, a churning pool of eggbeater kicks. Every sport is stuffed with champions, athletes who have sacrificed incalculably.
Each day of the Olympics gives birth to another hero, another man, woman or child who may have forsaken normalcy for as many as 10 years in pursuit of this moment, some with scant hope of recompense. They are champions not yet known. In two weeks we will know them, respect them. Perhaps we will cry with them as they stand on the victory platform, as flags are raised and anthems played. Perhaps we will marvel at this power the Games have to slice through our hard-earned cynicism.
Surely the Olympics are built on an imperious precept. The nations of the world, so often riven by conflicts large and small, coming together in sport? It seems folly. To also sell tickets and to transport spectators, athletes and the many VIPs that descend upon Olympic sites? Why, it just seems too large, too hopeful. If such a thing were newly suggested, it would be laughed from the floor or given to some consortium of Nike and Disney to toy with. Yet it works. Lord, how it works. It works because of the athletes. Tonight the Olympics become theirs.
SI Olympic Dailies
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