Atlanta snubbed in Olympics telecast?
Observant viewers of Friday evening’s Opening Ceremony telecast noticed something missing in a tribute to past games: Atlanta.
The apparent snub occurred during a film which kicked off the quirky, four-hour extravaganza, produced by British director Danny Boyle of “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Trainspotting” fame. So far there’s been no official explanation as to why a montage featuring the logos of previous Olympics didn’t include Atlanta.
ESPN notes that a famous Atlantan also was slighted during the telecast: “An entire tribute to the history of British pop music, right down to an East London rapper, and no mention of Elton John? Maybe he’s been disowned because he lives in Atlanta now?”
And who could forget the snub by then-International Olympic Committee czar Juan Antonio Samaranch, who declared Atlanta’s 1996 effort “most exceptional” during that year’s Closing Ceremony? At previous games Samaranch, a former top official under Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco, had congratulated the host city for holding the “best Olympics ever. “
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229 comments Add your comment
ryan
July 28th, 2012
8:25 pm
Atlanta’s open ceremony was terrible lets face it Europeans there still hatred there so obviously British will slap our face IMO China had the best opening and closing ceremony’s there was some good moments for the Atlanta games but the only memory will have was bombing at Centennial park .
ron
July 28th, 2012
8:26 pm
Count one more vote in the who gives a dam column. I watched about 30 minutes of opening and that was some of the weirdest crap I have ever sat through. Going to miss that 30 minutes I will never get back
Native Peach
July 28th, 2012
8:39 pm
I am from here and I live here, so I can’t say I don’t understand… but yes, I definitely noticed the omission. It was a snub.
Also agree with an earlier comment about being a world-class city. Uhhh… if that’s something we want, we need to actually TRY harder, not just stand on our airport and a softdrink and demand to be respected as a top player.
JP
July 28th, 2012
8:43 pm
Manny a bomb did detonate in Olympic Park but did you forget about the athletes killed by terrorist?
john
July 28th, 2012
8:44 pm
MMMM! Let’s see. Crime ridden downtown, the “Real House wives of Atlanta, The trolley car from Centennial park to King Center,World of Coke,Stone Mountain , A completely mismanaged MARTA system and now the Transportation referendum will probably fail .
No real science museum, no government help to build a new Symphony Hall ..but plenty for a bid for a NASCAR museum and the “Bubba” Olympics. We should have been snubbed in the opening Atlanta was turned into a third world trinket and T Shirt outlet downtown. Really Atlanta? Wake up !
How can anyone think they live in a world class city ? Atlanta should have Sherman come through ..burn it again,rebuild and do it right this time !!!!
Richard Simmons
July 28th, 2012
8:49 pm
I have to laugh at you people who keep harping on how the Atlanta games didn’t leave a debt. That is true, however, it would NOT be true if the Atlanta games had to repay the $500 MILLION they received in tax payer funding. The Atlanta games ended with about $10 Million in the bank. Minus the $500 MILLION given to them by taxpayers, that leaves a big, huge hole, no? So crow all you want about Billy Payne, but without SOCIALIZATION he would have been pilloried.
Richard Simmons
July 28th, 2012
8:51 pm
Also, want to know why the Atlanta games get no respect? Two words: silver pickups.
Glenn campagn
July 28th, 2012
9:04 pm
The sporting competition was great. But the production and presentation by Atlanta was cheap and lacked class, beauty, integrity, thought, and sophistication. It was a boondoggle.
Atlanta for the most part does not value high end. They prefer less expensive, simple, cheap , 2nd rate, knock off or also ran.no originality. Unsophisticated.
Sorry. But for the most part that is true. I live here and like it , but the true high end is a very small crowd here. People just don’t know .it is trying. But left trying. With some success , but mostly misses. The people just don’t know the best or don’t care. They want cheap and simple. And that does not make it wrong. It just is what it is.
It is a class thing. A value thing.
Andre
July 28th, 2012
9:06 pm
I give a damn. We were snubbed!!!! I thought my tv. wasn’t wide enough and that’s why I didn’t see the poster. But I checked it on a wide screen and it was NOT there.
Weena
July 28th, 2012
9:16 pm
I left Atlanta because of those damn olympics. The shameless self promotion turned me against anything Atlanta. Haven’t been back in 16 years and haven’t missed a thing. You should see the looks I get when I tell people I once lived there.
Thogwummpy
July 28th, 2012
9:24 pm
Remember, Atlanta’s Olympics had an opening ceremony with pick-up trucks. Kid you not…PICK-UP TRUCKS!!! Say no more. Boyle’s little socialist entertainment lecture included something I think was telling…and accidentally revealing. In his depiction of their nationalize healthcare system, did you notice they’d put two kids in one bed? THAT’s where it eventually leads folks, degraded service and standards. Cause you can only rape productive people for just so long before they get frustrated from carrying the parasitic slacker class…and throttle back on economic effort. Incentives matter, and thusly is the fate of all Left wing schemes.
heartofdarkness
July 28th, 2012
9:25 pm
I read today where the last Olympics that were hosted by London in 1948 housed the athletes in abandoned military barracks and participants had to bring their own towels and soap, and were glad for the opportunity to compete. This was the first post war Olympics, and a time when many around the world were still picking up the pieces of their shattered lives. The Games offered the vision of a better world than the one recent history had provided. When we fail to draw inspiration from the sublime emotions fostered by international competition, we are left to be assailed by the mundane.
Jason
July 28th, 2012
9:25 pm
More importantly, NBC left out a 6-minute tribute to terrorist attacks in London the day after they won the Olympic bid, but still found time for Costas to gripe about the lack of a tribute to the Israeli Olympians who were murdered in Munich. That, along with Matt and Meredith running their mouth throughout the first 90 minutes of the Ceremony, really ruined the whole experience for me.
As far as our city getting left out, heck, we’ve done more to make people forget the Olympics were here than anything you didn’t see last night.
spider
July 28th, 2012
9:31 pm
i wished all these atlanta haters would move the hell out and help ease the traffic for the rest of us that like living here.
Who Cares?
July 28th, 2012
9:32 pm
“no mention of Elton John? Maybe he’s been disowned because he lives in Atlanta now?”
He has at least five homes….He does not live here year round. Get over yourself
samaranch
July 28th, 2012
9:33 pm
who cares what Juan Antonio Samaranch thought about the Atlanta Olympics. He was corrupt and took our bribes and the bribes of SLC. Also – he turned a blind eye to performance enhancing drug use during the olympics. See Carl Lewis – who was just as dirty as Ben Johnson.
Eugene
July 28th, 2012
9:33 pm
Each year the television coverage of the Olympic Games seems to get worse and worse. NBC’s coverage has the look and feel of sometype pagent rather than the look and spirit of an intensely competitive sporting event. Their coverage before and now during the Games is totally focused on a select few athletes and a limited number of events.
Oh, how I miss the “Wide World of Sports” television broadcast formats. Typically, ABC’s would assign individuals to cover events at the Pan Am Games, World Championships, Olympic Games, etc. who were not merely “Broadcasters” but who were “Sportcasters who had indepth specialized knowledge and professional relationships with other sportscasters, coaches, and athletes from all over the globe, not just from America.
Although, they were Sportcasts, they were also critics who could pick apart an athlete’s performances with the best Olympic judge as well as storytellers who created a sense of excitement and anticipation in viewers with their commentaries.
so WHAT?
July 28th, 2012
9:34 pm
Fishwrap. This is the kind of stuff that makes me so glad after 30 years i discontinued delivery of this paper. What a bunch of whiners. Who cares Atl was not mentioned? I watched it and thought it was so far superior to Atlanta’s opening, Pickup trucks? seriously! how embarrassed I was in 96. Sir Elton left London. Lucky us!
Gary
July 28th, 2012
9:37 pm
They didn’t include Atlanta (1996) AND Los Angeles (1984) games. I wonder if it is a response to Obama’s dissing England and it’s prime minister.
Casey
July 28th, 2012
9:39 pm
On sattelite radio they reported that NBC heavily edited the opening ceremony so maybe we were just cut out. Not sure I understood the tribute to their national healthcare or the couple trying to meet in the house. Too much of the opening ceremony’s usage of film was bizarre. They gave us grief for the silver pick up trucks but many forget the beautiful tribute to the Greeks for starting the games.
The world media was biased from the beginning. I say hey we aren’t left with rotting venues (hello Greece, Montreal, many, many more) and hugh debt. Commercialism who cares, these games have been a sham for years since there hasn’t been a true amateur athelete in years.
James Smith
July 28th, 2012
9:39 pm
Could be due to Britain only winning 1 Gold, 8 Silver and 6 Bronze medals at the Atlanta Olympics
- shameful.
Dave
July 28th, 2012
9:47 pm
Who cares that was 16 years ago. . .every Games has it’s hiccups. . .plus at the end, I was glad to see Samarach and crowd go. In general, the official IOC dignataries were poor guests, , ,with perhaps the exception of the Princess Royale, most of them were no more than holier than thou elites. . .prime example was the Canadian official’s wife who felt that an Atlanta police officer should have known who she was at first glance, kowtowed to her like she was the Dowager Empress of China Cixi, and essentially stop all 12 lanes of traffic on the Downtown Connector so that she could walk across it. (I’m being facetious on the last part, but she did get very angry that she as the wife of the IOC Vice-Chair was stopped by one of our hardworking police officers who was trying to perform traffic control. She only demonstrated to the world when she complained publicly to the media that she is the X-itch that really and truly was and probably still is.)
Najeh Davenpoop
July 28th, 2012
9:48 pm
“Atlanta fears all things different.”
Atlanta and the suburbs are not the same thing. Pretty confident that most of the negative comments are coming from places like Kennesaw.
Dave
July 28th, 2012
9:49 pm
Actually, the IOC officials were such poor guests in Atlanta, I was not surprised when the whole payolla scandal erupted over the Salt Lake games.
gettheHout
July 28th, 2012
9:59 pm
There appears to be quite a few people on this thread living in our great city who obviously need to GET THE HE!! OUT. And quite frankly, the sooner the better. We don’t need you. We don’t want you. Clearly life has been unkind to you assorted belly achers, malcontents, whiners, crybabies, and general nabobs, so perhaps a change of scenery would do you good. I know it would do the rest of us who love this town a world of good not to every have to come into contact with people are vile as you lot.
Have a lovely weekend. You seem to need it.
26belly
July 28th, 2012
10:00 pm
If you choose to hide behind your IPhone, Pad, Laptop, etc. with your anti-Atlanta/anti-South comments…get your Yankee/Carpetbagger @$$’e$ the hell out of Atlanta! Delta is ready when you are!
Yeah right
July 28th, 2012
10:10 pm
Does anyone remember how they pushed some of the Atlanta population out of the city so they could build and make the city “better looking” for the Olympics. Thousands of people were affected in a negative way. The city was not too kind to some folks.
Jake
July 28th, 2012
10:19 pm
Two Billy’s ruined it for us. Bill Campbell and Billy Payne. One went to jail, and the other got “lucky”. Billy Payne’s “gifts” were considered by many to be bribes. GOOGLE it, or look through the AJC archives. You may remember Payne was kind enough to teach Utah all he knew about how to get the Olympics, and they also were embarrassed in the end and tarnished for inappropriately “gifting”, too. I suppose that is when Romney was asked to help them out.
Payne and Romney both also have something else in common, neither really didn’t want the financial records of their Olympics to become public information. The AJC won their legal battle for access to the public records (thank you!), but Romney apparently had them destroyed.
boots
July 28th, 2012
10:29 pm
Screw them.
Lena
July 28th, 2012
10:31 pm
I rewound my DVR over & over to see if I had missed it. NO/ NO/ NO it was not there// We had a good time anyway//////
scott
July 28th, 2012
10:35 pm
first Atlanta had no business with the olympics it shouldnt have been here..Atlanta has a long way and the region is to racialy divided and intolerant to hold such an event that is all inclusive of folks from all over the world when Atlanta region cant even tolerate the differences in the folk that live here…Face it this is not Seattle,San francisco,Vancouver,Toronto,Paris,Rome,or Sydney..those our world class cities…the olympics were a detriment to Atlanta more so then a boost..and made it much more of what it was before the olympics..more racist,more divided ,more corrupt,crowded ,more congested,more crime,
ATL80
July 28th, 2012
10:36 pm
I did not move here until after the Olympics. I know that Centennial Park and Turner Field are venues that remain from the games but I wonder how in the wold did Atlanta pull off the Olympics. I can’t imagine where or how. I read all these comments about how great the transformation was for downtown. Have you been down there lately???? Sure the park is nice but you can’t walk around downtown without being hustled constantly. I won’t take MARTA to a Braves game because they funnel you through the Underground to catch the shuttle on the other side. Yes, that is part of being in an urban area, but I have been to much large cities and not had to deal with it on this level. Unless there’s an event (concert, sports, etc.) I try to avoid going south of Ponce. My company can’t have our convention downtown because our cleints would be scared to death. I love Atlanta, but it still has a lot of work to do before it is a world class city.
gettheHout
July 28th, 2012
10:44 pm
Scott, as it has been said, it’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to tap on your keyboard and remove all doubt. You clearly don’t travel much. I lived in Seattle and San Francisco and if you think Atlanta is more racist than those cities you are out of your mind. I also lived in New York City and worked for months in L.A. All of those cities are racist to the core. The only difference is that people in those cities do their racism usually behind closed doors. At least in the south you generally know when you’re dealing with a racist because they’ve at least got the guts to say it right out in the open. In the cities I mentioned before, a black man is only “black” as long as he’s in the room. Once he leaves, it’s a different matter to those left behind.
Racism is EVERYWHERE. London as well as most of the European continent has some of the most racist people on the planet.
OldWoodenBox
July 28th, 2012
10:44 pm
Was a nice place before all the Yankees from the run down out of work dysfunctional cities moved here to make the city what it is now. They city can never be anymore than it is, a city of hate and greed, a city full of lack of guidance, a city of racial bias, who cares more about hiding behind what it hasn’t done, than ever looking to see what it would take to make a good place to live.
scott
July 28th, 2012
10:50 pm
Atlanta=still southern mentality…long,long,long,long way before becoming world class..wanna see world class city and also well ran with a fantastic downtown thats vibrant and hopping…See Seattle..thats where the olympics should have been not racialy backwater Atlanta…Atlanta will be Detroit no2 but never WORLD CLASS
Olympics Yawn
July 28th, 2012
10:53 pm
The Olympic Committee = international mafia. It is a huge scam on the business people in the host city. After their crimes (and crimes of their spouses), they skip town and flee while pleading diplomatic immunity.
observer
July 28th, 2012
10:56 pm
” Samaranch, a former top official under Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco, ………..”. Shame on you AJC. Atlanta has been kissing Samaranche’s ass to get Atlanta selected as a venue for 1996 Olympics. Does that make Atlanta a fascist ass kisser?. which is worst being a fascist or being a fascist ass kisser? Or did his alleged fascist association came to light when he gave Atlanta a rating it did not like but probably deserved ? How low can one get
Rod
July 28th, 2012
10:56 pm
THey weren’t snubbing Atlanta – they were snubbing the USA.
The portion mentioned also skipped over the 1984 Olympics in LA.
1984 and 1996 were both skipped – no reason provided.
skyhawk1
July 28th, 2012
10:58 pm
How Atlanta could host the games in the first place is way beyond me.
F.I.L.A.
July 28th, 2012
10:58 pm
Watching YouTube videos of our Olympics, especially the Opening Ceremony really takes me back. Glad I was able to experience part of it for myself. Truly brings a tear to my eye to realize that my little town hosted the greatest event on the planet. We didn’t have LED TV’s or any amazing technology, just a ton of dedicated volunteers that worked their butts off. We hosted the last Olympics of the 20th Century, so it still had a charming, old world feel. Too bad the social media generation is only interested in flashing lights, HD cameras, and tweets, and the older generation is still whining about pickup trucks, which was 1% of the ceremony and not that big a deal.
Feel honored that we are just one of 3 U.S. cities to host something so phenomenal.
yo mama
July 28th, 2012
10:59 pm
i remember the day after the bombing, i had been assigned a camera position on top of cnn center feeding the controlroom with up to date, k-9 efforts, to camping out from 6pm-6am everyday across from richard jewels apt, only to get morning shots of his mom taking the dog out for a poop. other cnn crews did follow mr jewel to a few gay bars he frequented tho. thats what i remember about my olympics. theat darn bomb changed it all. i did meet arch bishop desmond tutu and joe frazier, hughy lewis and the news, hakeem olaijuaon(?).
funny thing tho on the day after i got off work, and went to the stadium sat at a bar and proceed past security, with me and my two friends with beers in tow. we got into the women;s 10k final for free, used my cnn badge.
that night i told my friend what we did, and he did the same thing the next day and got arrested and missed all of the olympics because no one knew he was in jail. no one was home.
Braun
July 28th, 2012
11:00 pm
Only a couple of people got blowed up in Atlanta. What’s the big deal?
Shieldy
July 28th, 2012
11:02 pm
‘96 made us look like the bumpkins we were & did McDonalds sponsor the “McFlame”??
Ali was great but pitiful last night. Very sad!
Claude
July 28th, 2012
11:02 pm
Seriously, who gives a frog’s butt about the Olympics? Are people really watching this tripe?
Sandy Springs Res.
July 28th, 2012
11:03 pm
Who cares. That ceremony was so boring that the Queen of England almost fell asleep.
Lulu
July 28th, 2012
11:04 pm
Too bad we didn’t have Jane Fonda living here at the time that would have made my, a seventh generation native Georgian, snapshot of the whole thing complete: Hanoi Jane and that great boxer who served his country so valiantly when called to military service center stage versus the innocent man accused of being a bomber just because he was white and carried a legal badge! Expecting what happened I didn’t just leave the state, I left the country ’til it was all over! And don’t pat yourselves on the back too much before you count up the cost to the state and other GA cities that got caught up in the fiasco. Perhaps it is a guilty conscience which makes you so quick to take offense that you were slighted when, as pointed out, we did get mentioned by many national media announcers. If you can be proud of that year then go to it and hold your head up high!
Wesley
July 28th, 2012
11:04 pm
I had to choose between watching a DVD of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the Olympics. This was a no brainer. Ahhhh, Mr. Hand. Totally Awesome!!
done
July 28th, 2012
11:05 pm
84 LA games snubbed along with Atlanta and 72 Munich is not snubbed. Go figure.
Jeri Curl
July 28th, 2012
11:06 pm
Anyone still bringing up Hanoi Jane really needs to Get A Life!! What a freakin’ LOSER!!
Elvis Costello
July 28th, 2012
11:07 pm
Get over it Lulu! It’s time to maybe…get a life.