Olympic Committee ultimately picked Atlanta over Minneapolis-St. bid city over about a dozen other early candidates and that IOC members would vote in 1990 to bring the Games back to the U.S. But Young was skeptical both that Georgia’s capital would be chosen as the U.S. So it became a private financing plan, led by Peter Ueberroth, one that ultimately generated $225 million in profit.Ītlanta tried to follow suit. Bradley told him that the best thing that happened to the LA ’84 bid was that the city government was against it due to cost concerns. When Young first got involved in bid talks in the late 1980s, he went to see Tom Bradley, who was the Los Angeles mayor when it hosted in 1984. There are Olympic ties between the two cities. since the Centennial Games in Atlanta in 1996. The 2028 Los Angeles Games will be the first Summer Olympics and Paralympics in the U.S. “He went to the barber shop hugging and kissing everybody, and he went to a fish restaurant the Nation of Islam sponsors here in the Black community,” Young said. ' said, ‘No, I want to get out and see the people,’” Young recalled. So Young said he’d bring a barber to him. That was of course a closely kept secret at the time, so officials wanted to seclude him in a hotel.

“I need to get a haircut.”Īli, then 54 years old and 12 years into his Parkinson’s diagnosis, was in town to light the cauldron.

Young, the Atlanta mayor from 1982 to 1990, and co-chair of the Olympic organizing committee, recalled exactly what he heard on a telephone the day before the Opening Ceremony. If Muhammad Ali was on the other end of the phone, you would still remember it 27 years later, too.Īndrew Young, now 91 years old, was recently asked his clearest memories of the 1996 Atlanta Games.

Visit /hometownhopefuls for more stories from across America as these Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls prepare for Paris in summer 2024. We’ll learn about their paths to their sports’ biggest stage, and the towns and communities that have been formative along the way. and Puerto Rico, as they work towards the opportunity to represent their country at the Paris 2024 Games next year.

Throughout the summer, in a series called Hometown Hopefuls, NBC is spotlighting the stories of Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls from all fifty states, as well as Washington, D.C.

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