Georgia Tech and the 1996 Centennial Olympics

By: Melissa Fralick

We will not be the same after 1996.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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,” Ashley Gigandet Joseph, IA 94, says. “It felt like we were living in a construction zone.”

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

By: Tony Rehagen

This Spring, Chaunte Lowe started a new home improvement project. She went to The Home Depot, bought some plywood, wall brackets, and rubber, and took to the backyard of her Florida house. She wasn’t building the floor of a clubhouse for one of her three children or a crude patio for herself. Lowe was putting together a makeshift approach for her high-jump gear so she could train while in lockdown.

For Lowe, making the U.S. Olympic Team bound for Japan is about much more than fulfilling her own professional ambition. In fact, after tying for seventh in the 2017 national championships, Lowe says she was all but done with track and field. But then, in August 2018, Lowe found a lump the size of a grain of rice on her breast. Eventually doctors diagnosed it as an early stage of an aggressive form of cancer. Six rounds of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy left Lowe cancer-free. That’s when the surgeon performing her reconstructive surgery urged her to aim for a fifth Olympiad. “He told me that people don’t realize how many young, skinny, and fit people he sees with cancer,” says Lowe. “He said, ‘If you go to the Olympics, your story is going to save lives.

Lowe’s story began at Georgia Tech in 2002. She had come all the way from Riverside, Calif., to not only pursue a track career but also to challenge herself in the classroom. “Before students even get there, they’ve made the decision to come to Tech knowing the academics are going to be challenging while trying to compete at the NCAA Division I level,” says Alan Drosky, women’s track and field head coach for the Yellow Jackets. “A lot of young people have ambition to be excellent in everything. But Chaunte’s drive to actually reach her goals is not common at all.”

That competitive fire enabled Lowe to keep her grades up while excelling on the track. At the collegiate level, that meant helping the team in any way possible. Even on an ACC Championship Team, Lowe would score in the long jump, hurdles, and triple jump. “She even wanted to run the anchor leg of the relay race if we’d let her,” says Drosky. “She wanted to line up in every event we would put her in.”

Meanwhile, on an international level, Lowe focuses her energies on the high jump. And with the guidance of world-renowned high jumper and Georgia Tech jumps coach Nat Page, she would become a world champion and American record holder (which she set a mere 10 months after giving birth to her second child). But Olympic glory was a bit harder to come by. Lowe says she had worked so hard to make her first Olympic team in 2004 that by the time the then-sophomore got to Athens, she was overwhelmed by the actual competition. She finished a disappointing sixth in both 2008 Beijing and 2012 London. Four years later in Rio, she knocked the bar off with the heel of her foot on her last jump and barely missed the podium, coming in fourth.

Finally, in 2017, the International Olympic Committee announced that, after reviewing samples from drug tests taken prior to the Beijing games, three athletes had tested positive for banned substances. The three were disqualified, lifting Lowe into third place. She flew to Los Angeles with her family and Coach Page to receive her bronze medal that November. Less than a year later, she had cancer.

Lowe doesn’t pretend that the diagnosis didn’t frighten her. But she says she reacted the only way she knew how—the way she had learned in college. She did her research, made a plan, put together the best team of doctors, and put herself in the best position to overcome the disease. After doing all that, making a fifth Olympics might not seem as impossible as it once had.

“It’s not going to be easy,” says Page, her old coach. “But she knows she can go through it; she’s done it before. And going through breast cancer might have given her a sense of what she’s really capable of. If there’s anybody that can do it, it’s her. I won’t ever doubt her.”

Page even thinks that the yearlong delay for the Tokyo games might help Lowe by giving her extra time to prepare herself and get back to full strength—if she can just find a way to train. Because of her chemotherapy, Lowe’s immune system is compromised, making her at a higher risk of developing Covid-19.

So she has acquired some weights and workout equipment for home workouts. And, of course, she’s building her own high jump in the backyard. Here, she’ll train, take care of her family, and prepare as best she can to tackle any and all challenges that might await.

“There was something about the fight I learned at Georgia Tech,” says Lowe. “You don’t crumple and cry. You find a way to get it done. You find a way to win.”

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.

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.”

“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 successful bid.

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