My Olympic Rankings: Atlanta No. 8

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BEIJING -- Dave Maraniss has written an excellent book about the Rome Olympics in 1960 and how significant they were to The Movement.

The 1972 Games in Munich provided some of the most memorable stories of the century, sports and, tragically, not just sports.

I wish I could have covered both, though that would make me about 90 years old.

The first Summer Olympics I covered were in 1976 in Montreal.

This will be my ninth.

I am often asked which were my favorites, which I will address in coming days. Today, I will start with my least favorite, Atlanta in 1996.

In the interest of fairness, I have never heard an athlete who competed in those Games complain about them. The Olympics are supposed to be about the athletes. So give Atlanta high marks for taking care of them.

But this is my blog, not theirs. Atlanta didn’t do a good job of taking care of me. (Or my 10,000 or so colleagues in the media.)

This has nothing to do with the fact that the realtor the L.A. Times commissioned to reserve apartments for us overbooked them. When I arrived in Atlanta a week before the Games, she was in police custody. You can’t blame the Atlanta organizing committee for that.

Neither can you blame the organizing committee for the bombing in Centennial Park.

You can blame them for hiring bus drivers for media buses who didn’t know where they were going. You can blame them for an information system called Info ’96 that we renamed Info ’97. It was that slow. The pity was that a consultant from London told them a month before the opening ceremony that their results system was inadequate. They either didn’t believe her or didn’t believe it would make a difference in how their Games were perceived.

The Atlanta organizers, as likeable as most of them were personally, were a little like the Beijing organizers. They had an inferiority complex but weren’t particularly open to advice.

There’s a reason the International Olympic Committee makes sure that the media have unfettered access during the Games -- because we deliver the news around the world about the athletes, many of whom don’t get much attention in the four years between Games.

Atlanta’s organizers apparently didn’t get the memo.

Next: No. 7 -- Montreal

-- Randy Harvey

Photo: The opening ceremony in Atlanta featured an artistic performance. Credit: Anacleto Rapping / Los Angeles Times.