Legacy of Atlanta's Olympic dream

Oprah. She say: for your dreams to start coming true you have to wake up first. Me? I say: same goes for your nightmares, Oprah girl.

Now I'm awake. I'm sweating. I'm in Atlanta, of course. I'm sure I just heard Pat Hickey say that there's no reason why Dublin can't bid for the 2016 Olympics. Pat used to say that Dublin couldn't host the toilet facilities for the Olympics. Pat used to be right. Now I must say to Pat: one BertieBowl doth not an Olympiad make.

Where did I go wrong with Pat? He used to be such a good boy, respectful to all journalists. Suddenly I feel like ole Ma Soprano. I just wish the lawd would take me now.

Or take Atlanta. Centennial Bloody Olympic City. Couldn't they just have left it be when Sherman razed it to the ground? I mean, didn't he have a point? Isn't a city supposed to be more than parking lots and sports facilities? Atlanta has all the atmosphere of Belfield on a rainy Good Friday.

I've tried hard to love this dump. I have. The people are friendly and diverse, after all, but Atlanta is still Huckster Central and I'm still the Mayor of Sucker City. I'll always wake up here knowing that Atlanta has had it's fun with me, knowing it doesn't respect me. Besides, after the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta needed to be ostracised by civilised society and sports hacks for another century. Sealed off. Given the Chernobyl deal.

Atlanta knows it too. They crave these fleece fests like the Super Bowl, but even Atlanta seems to have had trouble getting excited about this week's business. Local celebrities and Mayor Bill Campbell appeared on TV commercials before the bowl urging each and every Atlantan to forget the guilt, to be a "Super Host".

"Yeah, whatever," mumbled Atlanta in response. Then they sulkily jacked up the price of air and water for a week or so. In restaurants and bars the staff wear little badges which announce them as "Super Hosts". This is Atlantan for what the mafia calls "made guys". We, the Super Guests, stare glassily at them and tremble. Heh heh, not that, not the southern hospitality, please Mr Bubba don't whack us.

Not much remains of the Olympic experience apart from the bad memories. Venus, my shuttle bus driver, is probably still lost out there with half-a-dozen sorry hacks on board, but the landmarks are tumbling. They aren't sentimental in Atlanta. Which is a good thing for a town with so little to be sentimental about.

The Olympic Stadium has been gelded and turned into a baseball park. Historic Fulton County Stadium, which sat next door, is a car park now. Say what you like, Atlanta can't get enough of car parks.

I mention all this by way of getting around to our kid Pat, for whom getting elected to the IOC was the adult equivalent of falling in with a bad crowd. I don't know how Atlanta '96 was for the princes, the poobahs, the popinjays and the ponces of the IOC, although I'm fairly sure they never met Venus The Shuttle Driver. I do know how it was for Pat Hickey though.

Pat spent the first week manacled to Michelle Smith (how did we know Michelle was a cheat? Well, she won the medley with Pat hanging off her right leg and Bernard Allen hanging off the left. Now that's not natural). Then Pat sent the second week under house arrest with Sonia O'Sullivan.

These experiences, plus the swooning excitement of hearing about the fabulous BertieBowl, may have fatally altered Pat's judgment. Pat. Pat. Pat. Dublin should never bid for the Olympics. Not even a BertieGames. Atlanta is the best argument for that.

Atlanta had everything. Facilities. Diversity. Coca-Cola. Delta. Can-do attitude. An airport the size of Leitrim. Population. Summer. Highways. Experience. Clout.

Yet Atlanta '96 was a disaster. Generalissimo Whitewash himself, J A Samaranch, said as much during his closing ceremony remarks. "Ye made a right bleedin' dogs dinner of that, didn't ye," he said. "Thanks for nothing."

Atlanta was too small and too greedy. People didn't know what they were doing. Staff were inflexible and aggressive. The weather was manky. The queues were long. A bomb went off.

These, lo and behold, are the very things which Dublin could bring to the Olympic table. Plus a harder line towards people of colour. One day visas only! Plus a total lack of big swimming pools and all the other things which the BertieBowl and Stade St Bernard will not be. Oh, plus a big-time cheat as our most famous Olympian.

Atlanta last week was a recovered memory. Everything was cold-light-of-day different. Off to the side was Centennial Olympic Park, the hub of the universe for a few weeks in 1996. I remember this spot before the Games as just a mess of parking lots and mean streets. Then poor old Richard Jewell got lynch-mobbed for bombing it. Now the park is the most visible legacy of the Olympics.

In January it's just windswept space. Flowerless and cold, the park seems like something apart from the life of Atlanta. It's three in the afternoon on Super Bowl week and apart from two shivering down and outs I'm the only person here.

This is the legacy. Up at Five Points people are still poor and panhandling. Out at Coca-Cola they've just laid off 2,500 Atlantans. Atlanta had the Games. Some rich people got richer. The city got a park and a bad name. People went back to their lives.

In 1992, when Gay Mitchell raised the issue of Dublin staging the Olympics, the arguments against were logistical, infrastructural and common sensical. Now they are philosophical.

The Olympic Movement has a long journey to make before it becomes a great celebration of humanity again. We in Ireland, with our Celtic Tiger smirks, our pasty-faced anti-immigrant loons and our shifty, eternal ambivalence towards our own sports cheats aren't what the Olympic Movement needs right now. We have our own journey to make. Atlanta and the Games were bad for each other. We should heed the lesson and shut up.

Can you hear me, Pat? You think Richard Jewell got it bad, wait till you see when they hand out the blame for the Dublin Olympic bid. That'll be really ugly.