Our Olympic Legacy

G. Wayne Clough, then president of Georgia Tech, wrote those words in the Summer 1996 issue of the Alumni Magazine, shortly before thousands of athletes,journalistsand spectators descended upon campus for the Centennial Olympic Games. And 20 years later, his conjecture has certainly proven to be true.

Landing the 1996 Olympics was a triumph for the city of Atlanta. For two weeks during that summer, all eyes were on Atlanta and Georgia Tech—home of the Olympic Village. It was a pivotal moment that amplified the gravitas of both the city and the university on the world’s stage. The Olympics indeed changed Georgia Tech forever. The campus expanded significantly to prepare for the games, with new athletic facilities, new residence halls and even new monuments built in just a few short years.

And just beyond Tech’s boundaries, the Olympics brought a sea change for Atlanta’s struggling areas of Midtown and Downtown that had fallen on hard times, providing a much-needed injection of attention and resources and putting urban neighborhoods on an upward swing. Reflecting on the Olympic legacy, Clough—who recently returned to campus to serve on special projects as president emeritus—believes it was the changes around Tech’s periphery that had the most profound impact on the Institute’s evolution.

By the early 1990s, much of Atlanta’s urban core was overtaken by blight, Clough says. Georgia Tech was surrounded on all sides by rundown communities struggling with poverty, crime and addiction. The Olympics served as a catalyst for improvement, launching politicians and community leaders into action to improve the city before it would be in the world’s spotlight.

One such example was the demolition of a notoriously rough housing project adjacent to campus known as Techwood Homes. A coalition including the city of Atlanta, Georgia Tech and the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games worked together to redevelop the area, replacing the aging housing project with a school, a YMCA and a mixed-income apartment complex named Centennial Place. This would be the first of Atlanta’s efforts to decentralize poverty by gutting housing projects and providing low-income residents with housing vouchers instead.

Clough says this was an important benchmark for Georgia Tech. By improving the appearance of the area just south of campus, the Institute was was able to begin creating a sense of place, a necessary step toward the goal of “defining the technical research university of the 21st century.”

“There was no way we could achieve our ambitious goal if you had to get to campus by passing through a depressed area,” Clough says. “When people approached campus it had to feel as if they were coming to a campus, a place that was welcoming to people and epitomized by vitality.”

Removing Techwood Homes was also the beginning of Georgia Tech’s partnership with city officials and community organizations to improve the areas surrounding campus. “The Olympics really launched us into that idea,” he says.

Tech’s next major transformation came as a serendipitous byproduct of the strict Olympic security. For roughly a month before the Olympics, access to campus was extremely limited, with gates installed around the perimeter to secure the Olympic Village and athletic venues. Clough says the only available entrance forced him to drive into campus on the Fifth Street bridge. This new route reminded him how much the area—which long before had been a vibrant part of student life at Georgia Tech—had deteriorated in the decades since the construction of the interstate highway separated it from campus.

“It was a terrible neighborhood—prostitutes on corners, strip joints, drugs, buildings deteriorating,” Clough says. “It was just awful. On top of it all the Fifth Street bridge itself seemed to be something out of the Kremlin’s architectural playbook.”

The many vacant buildings along West Peachtree, Spring and Fifth streets also got Clough thinking about possibilities for Tech to expand into the area. “Being forced to come in that way, I realized how many ‘for sale’ signs there were,” he says. “I met with my colleagues and the leadership of the Georgia Tech Foundation and said, ‘we need to buy this land now, while it is cheap and available. Even if Tech itself does not choose to do anything with it, we need to control it and what goes there.’”

The purchase led to the development of Technology Square, an ambitious public-private partnership which is now home to a thriving startup business culture, the Scheller College of Business, the Georgia Tech Hotel and Global Learning Center, restaurants and much more.

Tech’s involvement in the 1996 Olympic Games was initiated by Clough’s predecessor, John P. Crecine, who served as Tech’s president from 1987-1994.

Crecine, who died in 2008, ensured that Georgia Tech would play an instrumental role in the Olympics from the beginning. He orchestrated the creation of a cutting-edge, computer animated video presentation for Atlanta’s Olympic bid that gave the city a technological edge. He also set the stage for Tech to serve as the Olympic Village, committing to build new residence halls and a state-of-the-art aquatic center for the games.

In 1994, Clough stepped in as president, inheriting a campus already under construction in preparation for the Olympics. At the time, Georgia Tech was the only single university ever to serve as the site of an Olympic Village. To house 15,000 elite athletes from 197 countries, Tech built seven large, apartment-style residence halls. This $108 million investment in new housing doubled Tech’s inventory, providing enough space to house 70 percent of the undergraduate student body on campus.

Tech also improved many of its existing facilities. Approximately $20 million was devoted to refurbishing nearly every dormitory on campus, while many sororities and fraternities took the opportunity to rebuild or renovate their houses.

In addition to hosting the Olympic Village, Tech was also the site of two Olympic athletic venues.

McCamish Pavilion, then known as Alexander Memorial Coliseum, got a $12 million overhaul to serve as the site of Olympic boxing and Paralympic volleyball. Meanwhile, $21 million dollars was invested into new aquatic facilities for swimming, diving, modern pentathlon, synchronized swimming and water polo.

After the Olympics, Tech enclosed the pool and incorporated it into the design of the Student Activity Center—now known as the Campus Recreation Center. The pool was recently named the No. 1 collegiate competition swimming pool by College Ranker.

Tech also gained a new campus gathering place in preparation for the games. The Kessler Campanile, now one of Tech’s most iconic symbols, was originally built for the Olympics. The 80-foot, stainless steel obelisk rises from the center of a fountain surrounded by a plaza and amphitheater seating. The sculpture was donated by alumnus Richard Kessler, IE 68, MS IE 70, while the classes of 1943 and 1953 provided the funding to build the plaza.

Though the Olympics lasted just 16 days, preparations on Georgia Tech’s campus took five years.

Bill Ray, Hon 07, was hired in 1991 to oversee Tech’s $221 million construction program. As vice president for Olympic planning, Ray was also charged with the logistical challenge of making sure life at Tech continued around the games.

One of the biggest challenges was scheduling Tech’s summer quarter. Because campus was essentially off limits, a special schedule was created to condense the quarter into just eight weeks after the games. “We made a commitment that no student would have their graduation delayed because of the Olympics,” Ray says.

During her tenure as president of the Student Government Association, Ashley Gigandet Joseph, IA 94, was actively involved in Tech’s Olympic efforts. She served as an advocate for the student body, ensuring that their needs were considered as planning for games moved forward.

After graduation, Tech hired Joseph to help shepherd students, faculty and staff through the disruption the Olympics would bring. She helped to set up a satellite campus at nearby Grady High School and find solutions for campus activities that couldn’t move. “We had some really odd problems to solve,” Joseph says. “The kind of research that happened in various laboratories around Tech meant we had to do things like get certain insects at a certain level of development delivered to a lab on a particular day.”

As with any disruptive event, the Olympics were met with some ambivalence from students and faculty. Due to tight security, few students or faculty members were able to experience the Olympic Village after those years of preparation.

“Everybody on campus in the four to five years leading up to the Olympics experienced a significant inconvenience,” Jospeh says. “It felt like we were living in a construction zone.”

But there were fun and meaningful moments, too, which drew students into the excitement of the Olympics. Joseph recalls that when the swimming pool was completed, SGA held a raffle to select the first person to jump in from the 10-meter high dive.

Tech’s Olympic expansion also coincided with the beginning of the HOPE Scholarship, a lottery-funded program that provided full tuition for Georgia students with a 3.0 GPA or higher to attend in-state colleges and universities.

Partly due to this program, Tech’s student body doubled over 20 years, propelling the Institute’s reputation and providing ample population to fill the new facilities built for the Olympics. “I think if you ask anyone, they would say the Olympics were a good thing for Georgia Tech,” Ray says.

Ultimately, Clough believes the Olympics helped to move Tech toward its goal: defining the technical research university of the 21st century.

“We benefitted because we decided the Olympics would not be a moment frozen in history, but a launching pad for the future,” Clough says.

How Tech Knowhow Helped Atlanta Land the Olympics

Atlanta’s bid to host the 1996 Olympic Games was viewed by many as a long shot.

And without Georgia Tech, the city’s improbable victory likely wouldn’t have happened. A coalition of Tech faculty and students created a dazzling virtual tour for Atlanta’s Olympic bid that wowed the International Olympic Committee and helped secure the city’s selection as the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics.

There were many obstacles standing in the way of Atlanta’s Olympic ambitions. No city had ever won the Olympics on the first attempt, and few believed the International Olympic Committee would award the games to another American city so soon after the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. In addition, it was the 100th anniversary of the modern Olympics, and many believed it should go to Athens, Greece.

In 1989, Billy Payne, who led Atlanta’s Olympic charge, approached then-Georgia Tech President John P. Crecine for help with the Olympic bid. Payne wanted the Institute to create a 3-D architectural model of the city of Atlanta. But Crecine had something different in mind. “Pat Crecine being a technologist said ‘no, no, we can do something much better than that,’” recalls Ed Price, project manager for federal research partnerships at Tech’s Institute for People and Technology.

In 1989, terms like ‘virtual reality’ and ‘computer animation’ were relatively unknown. Crecine wanted to use this kind of emerging technology to give Atlanta an edge and recruited Tech’s faculty and students to help make it a reality. Among those who raised their hands for the effort were Price and Scott Robertson, associate director of Tech’s Interactive Media Technology Center, both of whom were undergraduates in 1989.

“For the next year, we worked to build the initial system to showcase how Atlanta would prepare for the games,” Price says.

The interactive presentation they created allowed a viewer to “fly” into Atlanta from above and, using a trackball, navigate the city as well as computer renderings of facilities that would be built for the Olympics. To accomplish this feat, the team blended helicopter footage of Atlanta with topographic data, computer graphics, and even a computer-animated runner carrying the Olympic torch into the future stadium.

“This was early experimentation in photogrammetry for visual effects,” Robertson says. “It was the first time someone had done such a detailed, and for the time, realistic, depiction of an animated human.”

Remember: This was 1989. To create the system, the Georgia Tech team had to use every supercomputer available on campus and even send data tapes away to other states for processing when they ran out of capacity.

“We used all of our computers, all of Georgia State’s, and other people’s, even, because there was so much computer processing to do,” Price says. “And that was before we had high-speed Internet connectivity.” In true Georgia Tech fashion, they engineered their way past any roadblocks to make their vision a reality. “A lot of these techniques had not really been developed. They were developing new ways of doing things. We came up with solutions to solve problems along the way,” Robertson says.

The final iteration of the system featured an animated map of campus back-projected onto a frosted Lucite model. This served as a sort of touch screen controller. Touching points on the Lucite map would drive the location viewed on the screens. This huge feat wasn’t accomplished in a silo. Price and Robertson recall how willing businesses and organizations were to pitch in. For example, Delta Airline’s machine shop assisted with the Lucite model. A local company gave them free use of their editing equipment. And people from Georgia State wrote the scripts and managed production of video for the final presentation that was delivered to the International Olympic Committee in Tokyo in 1990.

“It really was a citywide effort,” Price says.

All of this work was important to combat lingering stereotypes of the South and give credibility to the city of Atlanta, which was relatively unknown to much of the international community. The effort paid off. The IOC was blown away, and many believe that Tech’s innovative presentation was what pushed Atlanta over the edge. Shortly after Atlanta was announced as the host for the '96 Olympics, Andrew Young, a former U.N. Ambassador and the co-chair of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, praised Tech’s contribution to the sucessful bid.

“We had high-tech Southern hospitality,” Young said.