by Pico Iyer
The Danish team had had to borrow a boat from its Spanish rivals when its own failed to meet measurement, and another crew had lost its compass. The Italians alone had three pairs of brothers in their boats, and the Special Opening Ceremony in Savannah had featured shamrocks running down Irish faces as torrential rains and a thunderstorm broke out over the eight thousand people gathered on River Street. At the local cash registers, where I expected to find Izzy key rings on sale, merchants were selling copies of the memoirs of a Savannah transvestite.
The Olympics invariably feature so many heart-stopping athletic moments that it’s never hard to fill the three-hour documentary that Bud Greenspan generally films, and in Atlanta I knew there was no way I could resist the eighty-two-kilogram freestyle wrestling event, in which an athlete from Kazakhstan took on another from Moldavia, who happened to be his brother, and, having beaten his sibling and coach, went out with him for dinner. I watched Cuban baseball players say, “Domo arigato!” to their Japanese opponents, and the Japanese replying gamely, “Muchas gracias.” Nigeria somehow got the better of almighty Brazil in soccer, and in the hammer throw, a man called Kiss beat a man called Deal.
Though the Iranian president celebrated a wrestling victory (over a Russian, no less) by talking of “rubbing the nose of America in the dirt” and raising the Islamic flag in “the House of Satan,” and though every other Chinese medal was followed by questions about doping tests and Mandarin curses about “hegemonists,” the stadia themselves filled with happy men saying, “That’s real Olympic of you,” and Gigi Fernandez, for one, explaining how proud she was to be American, in Spanish. More than thirty thousand people showed up for a baseball game (between Australia and the Netherlands), at ten o’clock on a Monday morning, and in the Olympic Village one could see Monica Seles, one of the best-known millionaires in town, clearly relishing being just another kid again as she went bowling (barefoot) with other young athletes and headed out to cheer on the water polo squad. The Olympics often seem to have most meaning, ironically, for seasoned professionals like Seles, who get the chance to live like amateurs again for two weeks, playing for the fun of it and, in Seles’s case, working off the memory of a near-fatal stabbing by a rival’s fan three years before.
So the Centennial Games were a success, as Games, and provided the world with a new set of sellable heroes. But for the city that had waited six years (or, really, eighty) for its global coming-out, the debut was a catastrophe. Bus drivers hastily brought in from Baltimore and Chicago took athletes to their events by way, it seemed, of Maryland and Illinois, and, in one celebrated case, collapsed in tears on an off-ramp, confessing that they’d never driven on a freeway before. IBM’s next-generation information network—INFO ’96—listed the ages of young boxers as ninety-five, while Coca-Cola’s pavilion happily announced crowds of 20 billion (or three times more people than exist on the planet). The first morning of competition, the world’s defending judo heavyweight champion lost four years of his life when a bomb alert prevented him from showing up for his bout on time; on the first evening, at the gala prime-time unveiling of America’s latest “Dream Team,” the electricity in the Georgia Dome went dead for ten full minutes.
The great challenge and invention of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell once asserted, was “suspended judgment.” Yet globalism has made such a suspension more and more precarious, as more and more of us feel qualified to pronounce on more and more places (if only because we’ve glimpsed them on-screen), and every world event becomes as cacophonous as a neighborhood association meeting. In Atlanta’s case, the whole world banded together in a rare show of unity to call the Games a “horror trip” (as the German press said) and a “big mess” (as the Israelis pronounced), a “shambles” (in the words of the British), and “a disgrace” (as even the polite Canadians confessed). For every foreigner who felt that America was an upstart power that confused bigger with better and money with power, Atlanta was a gift-wrapped joy, and France-Soir was only one of the many papers around the globe that pronounced, “After Atlanta, any country in the world can apply to host the Games.” The poorest nation in the world, ran the consensus, could have staged the event with as much sophistication, and certainly more charm.
Some of this may have been a little unfair, and it’s never easy to host millions of visitors from everywhere, some of whom will complain that there are too few Beer Express joints on hand, and some of whom will complain that there are too many. It wasn’t Atlanta’s fault that TWA 800 plunged into the Atlantic three days before the Opening Ceremonies, or that the weather was sullen and gray. Yet insofar as I shared the world’s distaste for the city, it was because it had asked to be judged by the highest international standards, and, like any insecure being, kept on demanding that everyone around support it in the lies it told about itself.
More than once during the Games, I handed a waitress a credit card, only for her to look at it as if it were some kind of unintelligible foreign object. And as I took the subway out to Buckhead one day, surrounded by slogans for global brotherhood, I happened to ask a Nigerian how he found the city, and turned around, to find a local (not a redneck, but a prosperous-looking businessman, as it happened) referring to us as “animals.”
Every time I stepped into a cab during the Games, moreover, I felt as if I were stepping into a tribal fury. Nearly always, the cars were driven by recent immigrants from Ethiopia, and nearly always these men were as gracious and dignified as is their wont. But as soon as I’d say how much I’d been impressed by their country, they would tear—almost every one of them—into a violent tirade against the Tigreans, who had taken over the government, they said, and reorganized it along tribal lines (others might say, along different tribal lines than before). Around us, as they cursed, the billboards spoke eagerly of “solutions for a small planet.”
And every time I attended an event in the new showpiece Olympic Stadium, I found myself dropped off in one of the most desperately poor areas in the whole impoverished city. A “Great Atlanta Clean-Up” had been set up to move fifteen thousand of the city’s less sightly residents out of the “Olympic Ring,” and bright signs all around urged us to keep our eyes firmly on the gleaming Sponsors’ Village and the $209 million new stadium in the distance. But the road to complementary champagne ran past broken shacks and kids offering “pop” for two quarters, untended vacant lots and signs that sometimes said $10 PARKING. FREE SECUREITY.
We could see black men on the porches of these houses, sipping beer in rocking chairs and listening to the action coming out of tiny jerry-rigged speakers; inside their old homes, we could see Zenith TVs with rabbit-ear antennae shuddering images into the dark. From down the street, you could hear roars greeting the millionaire athletes (and, some keen-eared visitors from South Africa and Yugoslavia would say, the sound of automatic gunfire).
For me, the crowning hero of the Games—and the ideal embodiment of all the contradictions that lie at the heart of the Olympic Movement—came in the perfect, almost unassimilable form of Carl Lewis, “the greatest athlete in history,” as he’s often called, and one with a keen sense of how much greatness is worth in our inflated universe of the image.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw Lewis, at a special Mizuno press conference in a private room high in the hills above Barcelona: I’d never seen a human form so sleek, so pantherine, so beautifully smooth all the way to the tips of its ebony limbs. He sat on his dais, facing the cameras and questions of a hundred countries, and looked to me like a king, perfectly at ease, flashing his flawless smile and answering with a soft-voiced articulacy I hadn’t expected. I couldn’t imagine why so many sponsors and sportswriters had no time for him, unless it was just because he was too good to be true.
In Atlanta, though, I saw him burnish that impression with an act of self-transcendence that took my breath away. Nobody had really expected Lewis to be competing at all—he’d only made the U.S. team by an inch (in the long-jump event), and, in the
qualifying round at Atlanta, again, he seemed certain to fall out: going into his final jump, he was placed fifteenth in a competition in which only twelve people make it to the finals. Yet somehow, out of nowhere, he soared beyond himself, and beyond everyone else in sight, to sail into first place and the finals.
On the day of the long-jump final, I went along to the Stadium to see the old man take his curtain call. Again, he seemed to be showing up mostly as a formality—he’d planned to retire five years before, after all—and everyone knew he hadn’t jumped twenty-seven feet ten inches at sea level in four years. Yet somehow, again, on his third jump, when everyone was looking the other way, he stretched and he strained and he stretched, and he pulled off a jump of twenty-seven feet ten and three-quarter inches, eight inches farther than anyone else.
Then, with the air of godly entitlement that had not always endeared him to his rivals, he simply sat back and watched them try, one after another, to beat him (and fail). Imperial to the end, he even declined to take his final jump, as if it were not worth his time to try to improve on his lead. And so, as the dying sun turned faces to gold and the last long shadows fell across the field, just as everyone turned to the expected Olympic hero, Michael Johnson, about to run the four hundred meters, there, somehow, was Lewis, carrying an American flag around the stadium on a last great tumultuous victory lap.
I didn’t know what exactly I felt as I watched him on that run, but I knew I’d been stirred beyond words: like very few performers I’d ever seen, other than Michael Jordan, Lewis seemed to have some magical quality beyond his natural genius that allowed him to rise to the occasion when nobody could expect it, and to reinvent astonishment just as we were getting used to him. When he came into the press conference room a few minutes after his triumph, he looked at all the cameras and broke into a smile—“What are you guys all doing in my dream?”—as if to say that he’d been as taken aback by his feat as we were.
Then, for forty-five minutes, blending show business with seeming sincerity in the style he’d made his trademark, Lewis proceeded to deliver a “clinic,” as the sportswriters say, in the art of public relations. “Don’t give up because everyone says you’re too old,” he said, turning himself into a parable (and addressing himself already to the young of the world); “I don’t want to dig up dandelions, I just want to smell the roses,” he countered smoothly when someone asked him about his archrival, Johnson.
He even showed himself willing to be the master of the case against him. “I don’t think track wants another Carl Lewis,” he said brightly. “They’ll take the athlete, but they don’t want the whole package.” And then the package contrived to turn even his apparent vanity to advantage. He couldn’t recall his first gold, he confessed wryly, because “that was twelve years ago: almost sixteen hairstyles ago, hundreds of gray hairs ago, almost fifteen pounds ago.”
I came away exhilarated at seeing such a display of professionalism, both on and off the field (“You’ve got to present yourself,” Lewis had said. “You’ve got to look good; you’ve got to speak well”), and knowing that Atlanta would present no more memorable moment. Then, just as I was beginning to ponder the depths of what I’d experienced, I got word that Lewis was mounting a campaign—he’d appeared on fifteen TV stations more or less overnight, he’d conducted a special press conference at Nike, he was expressly soliciting messages of support from the public—to be admitted to the 4 × 100 relay team in place of some more qualified runner. He wanted to break his own Olympic record of nine gold medals with a tenth.
As dramatically as he’d built a monument to himself, he set about tearing it down.
When I left Atlanta for the last time, and the global road show directed itself towards its next stop, in Sydney (with its restaurants from 271 different countries, and a new “solar-powered suburb” to house the Games), and then in Salt Lake City (home now to the next great World Religion, and, thanks to its missionary needs, one of the world’s great language centers), I realized that there were two indelible images that I’d take away with me.
The first had begun on a chill winter’s afternoon, on blighted Auburn Avenue, where a small but enthusiastic group of girls in saris and volunteers in RACISM (JUST UNDO IT) T-shirts, and a few interested spectators such as me, had piled into the Freedom Hall of the King Center for a Multicultural and World Prayer Program.
A middle-aged Japanese woman had stood at a microphone, and, as children came forward from the wings, one after another, each bearing the flag of one of the 197 countries that would be participating in the Games, she solemnly intoned an “individual pledge of peace” and an affirmation of the “interconnectedness of our human family.” The rite went on for a long, long time—the pledges intoned 197 times—and then the Atlanta Baha’i Workshop staged a Dance of Racial Harmony—three white dancers, dressed all in white, coming together with three black dancers, dressed all in black. “There is no other hope,” one of the Baha’is said, “than to acknowledge and recognize the oneness of the human race.”
Finally, a little girl who couldn’t have been more than ten years old, standing on a chair so she could reach the microphone, her high voice trilling on without stumble or hesitation, proceeded to deliver an eloquent speech, urging us to recall “how connected we are.” We treat siblings in one way, she said, and strangers in another: but could we not see that strangers were just the siblings we never knew?
It was impossible not to be stirred by such a display of innocence and hopefulness; and it was impossible not to wonder how it could really apply to a world in which right is usually set against right.
The next day, however, on an unseasonably warm January afternoon, all the people in Atlanta who mattered—black preachers and civil rights veterans, movie stars and politicians and folks who’d just paid their dues—came to the Ebenezer Baptist Church and shook the rafters of the little place with their fire and conviction. It was a soaring, exultant afternoon, one person after another coming forward in Martin Luther King’s memory, and, speaking from the heart, and without notes, urging us to honor King’s legacy to the world, while others in the congregation got up and cried, “Do it, Lord!” and “Thank you, Jesus!”
A twelve-year-old boy came forward and led the assembly in a kind of litany, pointing his finger and shaking his cadences like King himself, and a black minister in front of me got up and waved his hands all about, crying, “Say it, son!” and “Listen, listen!”
Then Bill Clinton, just returned from Bosnia, and thoroughly in his element, took the microphone and, smiling down at the boy (now returned to his seat and looking like any shy and bespectacled seventh grader), delivered a radiant speech of his own, eyes glistening as he joined hands with King’s widow and son and sang out, by heart, every word of the National Negro Hymn (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”).
It did not matter, I thought, that the black bigwigs around me had copies not of the Bible but of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine in their hands, and Casio cell phones on which they were muttering plans for the highly exclusive Salute to Greatness dinner and All People’s Gala. It didn’t matter that there was something a little too tidy about the appearance of a speaker from the AFL-CIO, another from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a Hispanic representative, and an emissary from Nelson Mandela and the “New South Africa.” It didn’t even matter that the accommodation of so many special interests meant that the service went on for three and a half hours, throwing everyone’s schedule (and especially the city’s, cordoned off as it was to cater to the president’s motorcade) way, way off.
What did matter to me, as I looked around, was that there was a man in a yarmulke and a Chinese couple and a white general in uniform, and an Indian with a ponytail (leaning back to say something in Hebrew to a rabbi)—all in my own row—and nobody seemed to notice. Everybody was joined together by something beyond his circumstances—pop star and nonentity and politician and volunteer—and, after a grizzled black sheriff, who’d marched with King, gave his b
adge to the reverend’s family, everyone got up and linked hands for a final singing of “Kumbaya” and “We Shall Overcome.”
The Japanese consul had put it best when he’d said, “America’s great and lasting significance is its existence in the mind.”
My final memory of Atlanta and its Games came a few months later, in the dead of night. The competition was half over now, and finally beginning to find its rhythm: buses were more or less running on schedule, and computers were almost up to speed, and on the perfect first Friday evening of the Centennial Games, Kerri Strug, the forgotten member of the American women’s gymnastic team, had somehow, while hardly able to walk, pulled off her last vault to ensure the team’s gold medal. Here was the stuff of which Olympic dreams are made, the tiny teenager with the hobbled leg ascending the podium in the arms of her coach, and, while colleagues of mine prepared an image of the new American heroine to place on the cover of Time, I, in our Main Press Center office, put the final touches on an ode to the Olympic spirit.
Just then, there came a terrible thud, as if a filing cabinet had crashed to the ground on the floor above us, and the whole building shook, as in the kind of minor earthquake that I had come to know too well from living in Japan and California. People began running every which way, and we could hear sirens in the street, and see the television screens fill with pictures of mayhem and flashing lights and bodies sprawled out at Centennial Park, just a block away. Some of us tried to leave the building, to see what was going on, but police blocked our way, and the whole place was plunged into the fullblown anarchy that breaks out when a city’s lights (actual or moral) go out and nobody really knows what’s going on.
