The Atlanta Olympic story: are blacks getting any of the real gold?

Ebony, Feb, 1995 by Laura B. Randolph

THE 1996 Olympic Games may be more than a year away but, for Black businesses, the quest for gold began four years ago. That was when the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta to be host city for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games and dozens of minority-owned firms began the arduous process of preparing the complex business proposals that could land them a share of the phenomenally lucrative Olympic pie.

Phenomenally lucrative may actually be too mild a phrase to describe the kind of money involved. Olympic officials estimate that hosting the 1996 Games will have a $5.1 billion impact on Georgia's economy. Almost half -- $2.4 billion--will be spent by two organizations: the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG), the private, non-profit organization that is staging the events of the 1996 Games, and the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Properties (ACOP), the licensing arm of ACOG.

Merchandise sales have already exceeded $100 million. (That compares with $260 million dollars in total sales for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.) And the overall goal, says Bob Hollander, ACOP's vice president of licensing, is $1 billion in retail sales.

There are also hundreds of millions of dollars to be made in Olympic-related construction. The contract to build the Olympic Stadium alone was valued at more than $200 million. (Two Black-owned companies--H.J. Russell & Co. and C.D. Moody Construction--are part of the team that won the contract.) By the time the Games begin, ACOG will have awarded more than half a billion dollars--$516 million--for Olympic-related construction projects.

Ensuring African-Americans get their fair share of Olympic-related economic opportunities is a prime goal of the organization, says ACOG President and CEO Billy Payne.

It is a goal that Payne says he committed himself to as a direct result of the education he received from ACOG's co-chairman, former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, about the Black experience in America.

"Back in the early days when Andy and I were trying to win the votes we needed to bring the Games to Atlanta, we would travel around the world as much as 25 days out of the month," explains Payne. "Those long international flights were a real learning experience for me. I had grown up in an upper-middle-class White environment and I did my schooling before integration became the custom of the South. And so I had never really in my young adulthood been exposed to that which I knew was an important part of the culture and history of Atlanta. I asked every question imaginable--about the Civil Rights Movement, about Dr. King and, with Andy as my teacher, I began to develop and embrace a different sense of what Atlanta really was and how we got to where we are."

It was during those conversations that Payne says he and Young made a promise to each other. "We said if we're lucky enough to win the Games, if we're the dog that catches the car in this great race, were going to create an organization which afforded minority participation--and here that is basically African-American--at levels that were just simply unheard of.

"And we started off with significant goals about African-American involvement, not only in the way we would afford opportunities and spend our money, but in the way we would seek and acquire leadership throughout the organization."

Payne feels confident the organization has met those early goals. "While you never are perfect," he says, "I think by all measurements, and unequivocally against our Olympic Games history, this organization has been revolutionary in the way we spend our money, not only encouraging African-American participation but demanding it."

The numbers seem to match the rhetoric. To date, ACOG has awarded $25.5 million in design contracts, with $10.8 million going to minority and/or female architects and engineers. "Approximately 75 percent of them are African American," says Michael H. Ross, ACOG's construction division senior project manager for minority-and-female-owned businesses and president/CEO of the Atlanta-based management consulting firm, MHR International.

Olympic construction projects are also providing significant work for African American firms. "To date, ACOG has awarded $185.8 million in construction contracts, with $67.2 million going to minority-and-female-owned businesses," says Ross, whose company, along with another African-American-owned firm, Charles F. McAfee Associates, is one of four firms managing the design and construction of $500 million worth of Olympic construction contracts. "These numbers are simply unprecedented in the private sector for a development project of this size."

Even ACOG's critics--those who believe the bidding process' complex requirements, financial cost and stringent selection criteria keep far too many African-American companies on the outside looking in--say that these figures represent a vast improvement over the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, where Black businesses were afforded little opportunity to share in the wealth.