How Atlanta sold itself as an Olympics-worthy city

Thirty years ago, a Fortune cover story chronicled the improbable campaign that brought the Centennial Olympic Games to Atlanta. The force behind the global campaign for “this Sun Belt hustler” to host the 1996 Olympics was an extraordinary pairing, wrote John Huey, himself an Atlantan.

Billy Payne, a white real estate lawyer and former University of Georgia football player, supplied the conviction that such a Quixotic campaign could succeed. Andrew Young—the civil-rights leader, former congressman, U.N. ambassador, and Atlanta mayor—brought a global network and a political understanding of what Atlanta could represent.

When Payne and Young set out upon their mission, Huey wrote, Atlanta was “67% black and one of the poorest, most........

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