Atlanta Relives the Spirit of the Olympic Dream

(ATR) The Olympic spirit that the 1996 Summer Games brought to the city of Atlanta will be reborn this weekend at the 20th anniversary celebration in Centennial Olympic Park.

Volunteers, Olympians, Paralympians and organizers of the Atlanta 1996 Olympics will reunite at the park on Saturday, July 16 to "Relive the Dream" with musical performances, anecdotes from athletes as well as a fireworks show to cap off the night. The event is hosted by the Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC) that maintains the property.

"We hope to cultivate the reliving of the spirit that was in Atlanta in 1996," GWCC marketing and media manager Rebecca Mobley tells Around the Rings. "The primary focus of this event is the volunteers who helped put on the Games in ’96, without them we really couldn’t have had a very successful Olympics."

Performers at the event include Banks and Shane, Colby Dee, the Atlanta SEEiT choir and A-Town A-List. The musical performances will be interspersed with Olympic memories from president of the Atlanta 1996 Organizing Committee Billy Payne, Ambassador Andrew Young, Olympians Carl Lewis and Janet Evans as well as Paralympians Curtis Lovejoy and Tim Willis among others.

Mobley says organizers hope to welcome approximately 15,000 people to the park that serves as one of the greatest legacies of the ’96 Olympics. Volunteers will make up the largest portion of attendees but Mobley says Atlanta residents are more than welcome to participate in the free event.

"The main constituency is definitely the volunteers and our secondary target is the people of Atlanta who had a great time in ‘96 who want to come out and remember the fun times that were had down here," she tells ATR.

Communications specialist for GWCC Morgan Smith-Williams says the event is not just about celebrating the Olympics in Atlanta but the Olympic Movement as a whole.

"We are really excited about the 20th [anniversary] and marking that occasion because it’s such a big year and an Olympic year," Smith-Williams tells ATR. "With all the other things going on in the Olympic Movement with L.A. in search of their bid, we just thought it was important we showed our support and commemorate how great the last time the Olympics were in America and how awesome and transformative it was."

The celebration will be preceded by the next installment in a series of Athlete Town Hall meetings organized by the Los Angeles 2024 bid committee. Led by LA 2024 vice-chair Janet Evans, the town halls seek input from Olympians across the country about what they’d like to see in the L.A. bid and what organizers can do to make the athlete experience even better.

United States Olympic Committee chief executive officer Scott Blackmun will also be on hand for the event with LA 2024 president Casey Wasserman. Smith-Williams says that as stewards of Centennial Olympic Park the GWCC maintains a close relationship with the USOC.

Smith-Williams says the Atlanta Olympics were "transformative" and that Centennial Olympic Park was a key player in that transformation bringing in $2.4 billion of economic impact around the park.

"You have to think about what was here before Centennial Olympic Park," Smith-Williams says. "It was a dump in a project, a housing project that was abandoned. To take something like that and to turn it into a living, breathing, usable park that hosts events but is also there day-to-day for residents in the city of Atlanta to enjoy that also brought all these other wonderful things back to the city is one of the biggest things the park has done for Atlanta."

The two-hour event will be filmed by local ABC affiliate WSB but will not be broadcasted live. WSB is also airing short promotional commercials throughout the week to increase interest in the event and will air a two-hour special commemorating the 1996 Olympics in the week following the event.

Organizers at the GWCC have taken out advertisements in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and have a Facebook event page to promote the anniversary celebration beginning at 8 pm Saturday.

Written by Kevin Nutley

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