Georgia Will Always Remain on Our Mind

We’ll remember Michael Johnson. He defined these Olympic Games with an achievement that will link his name forever with that of his hero, Jesse Owens. For his first gold medal, won in the 400 meters, we saw his tears of joy. With the second, won at 200 meters faster than anyone had ever run the distance, we saw him light the night with a smile born of work he was born to do.

“I have been blessed with this talent,” he said. “It was my duty, my responsibility, to go out there and do something with it.”

We’ll remember him flashing past the finish line of the 200 meters, peeking over his shoulder at the timer and dancing in exultation prompted by the lighted numbers that provided rich context for his unprecedented 400-200 double: 19.32.

We’ll remember Kerri Strug, the American gymnast who leaped when she might have sat. With her vault done on a bad ankle, the U.S. team won its first gold medal in a most dramatic fashion.

The Chinese diver, Fu Mingxia, won both women’s events and now, 17 years old, she owns three golds. The Russian diver, Dmitri Sautin, once left for dead by thugs who stabbed him, came to the platform with scars criss-crossing his stomach. He, too, won gold.

The giant Siberian, Alexander Karelin, who trained by running in waist-deep snow, won his third gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling--but only after being pushed to greatness by an American son of Iranian immigrants, Matt Ghaffari, who later put his silver medal around the neck of a young girl whose mother died when a fool’s bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park.

Burundi is hell on Earth. It’s an African nation where perhaps 150,000 people have died in civil war the past three years. In Burundi’s first trip to the Olympics, 5,000-meter runner Venuste Niyongabo won a gold medal and dedicated it to peace: “For my country, I hope this will be a great thing.”

We’ll remember Carl Lewis, the ancient sprinter who at 35 won a ninth gold medal in an Olympic career without parallel. He made it to the long-jump final only on his last jump in the qualifying round. Then, as heroes of myth always do and heroes in reality do often enough to create the myth, he won.

We’ll remember Stefka Kostadinova, a Bulgarian, a world champion in the mid-1980s who took time off to have a baby and returned to competition only two years ago. In Atlanta, she set an Olympic high-jump record of 6 feet, 8 3/4 inches and said, “I am Olympic champion and a mother. Nothing else has much meaning at this moment.”

We’ll remember the world-record holder, Mike Powell, face down in the sand of the long jump pit after his failure there. The world-record pole vaulter, Sergei Bubka, declared it “a tragedy” when a bad Achilles’ tendon kept him out of an Olympics four years after he had no-heighted in the previous Games.

We’ll remember the little Turk, Naim Suleymanoglu, who lifted three times his weight and became the first lifter to win three Olympic gold medals.

Donovan Bailey of Canada set a world record in the 100 meters and then anchored the 4-by-100 relay team to victory over the U.S. team, which had won the event in 14 of the 17 Olympics it had run, losing only by disqualifications.

We’ll remember the Nigerian soccer team, always moving forward, which defeated the traditional power, Argentina, in the gold medal game in Athens, Ga., where the U.S. women’s team also won gold.

And we certainly will remember the American goalkeeper, Briana Scurry, who had promised “to run naked through the streets of Athens” if her team won the gold. It did, and she did at 2 a.m.: “I took my clothes off in the car, put a towel on, got out of the car, threw the towel down, ran down the street and ran back.”

Scurry said she ran maybe 20 or 30 feet each way.

And not entirely nekkid, as it turned out.

“I had my medal on,” she said.

We’ll remember the people who visited Atlanta for the fun of it and stayed despite an hour of terror. If anything, the way it turned out, the bomb in the park moved people to stand in defiance of fools.

In 17 days of competition, more than 3 million customers bought almost 9 million tickets, more than Los Angeles and Barcelona sold combined in ’84 and ’92. A million tickets were sold for track and field in Olympic Stadium, causing Michael Johnson to say, “Even at 10:45 in the morning, they were there. It was unbelievable. Those people deserve a gold medal.”

We’ll remember Rachel Moynan. Ireland is on her face. She’s all freckled rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes. She is 24, and she came to the park the morning Atlanta reclaimed it from the bomber. Standing with tens of thousands of people, she heard a preacher at a pulpit declare, “We loved this park. We still love this park.”

Rachel Moynan lives in the south of Ireland, a great distance from Belfast’s troubles. Yet she is a child of a generation left numb by terror. “For 25 years in Northern Ireland, bombs,” she said in our park. She came to hear the preacher. “Twenty-five years of violence has made us a bit complacent,” she said. “Unfortunately, we have a used-to-it attitude. We don’t react the way you Americans have. I like the way Americans react. You come together and pray.”

Then a trumpet sounded celebration and sorrow. Young people on the park’s grass sang of an amazing grace that transforms the lost to the found. And the preacher reminded us that Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Unearned suffering is always redemptive.”

And when the preacher sat down, a choir stood up. And the choir filled the park with sweet music. And at the end, they sang one word again and again.

The word floated down upon us, softly.

“Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”