Extraneous Wouldn’t Rule The Competitors

Will the last official sponsor out of Atlanta please blow out the flame?

Nothing lasts forever, except maybe an Enberg Moment. The 4,000th Olympic volunteer has just implored us to, “Y’all come back now,” but to do so we must first leave. ACOG is in charge of the arrangements.

I’ll be home for Christmas.

The Centennial Games are over. The fingers are trained to type “all over but the shouting,” but in Atlanta, the shouting came well in advance from Billy Payne - Bubba Barnum hisself - who promised us and Juan Antonio Samaranch the dadgummest Olympics anybody ever saw.

How were we to know he was talking about rowers resorting to busjacking just to get to the starting line?

Next to U.S. track coach Erv Hunt’s rock-and-a-hard-place of whether to Carl or not to Carl, the most overbaked drama of the Olympiad became the Big Juan’s final remarks and whether he would - per his usual policy - declare these to be the best Games ever. After the bikes and skateboards wheeled in the closing ceremonies - the fellers in the all-chrome pickups must have been out huntin’ possum - Samaranch allowed only that the Games were “exceptional.”

Ouch. The scarlet letter.

But Billy Bob and Big Juan and the indignant Fleet Streeters sardined on the subway and the put-upon T-shirt entrepreneurs - would you believe a commemorative silk-screen of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, clenched fists aloft, for $20? - forever missed the point.

It was never about Atlanta. It was about the athletes.

OK, for a few days it was about a community coping with terrorism and tragedy, but Payne whiffed on that one, too. Rather than go to the hospital to offer his sympathies, he went on “Today.”

No, there was a reason a record 8.6 million spectators turned out to witness the exceptional and the exotic, and I don’t think it was solely to say “neener-neener” to a demented maggot with a knapsack wired for death.

It was to see Angel Martino give her gold medal to a friend battling cancer.

To see Lida Fariman, the first woman to compete for Iran since the Islamic Revolution, pull on the stiff leather suit of a shooter over her long dress.

To see Josia Thugwane win the first gold medal by a black South African, in the men’s marathon. Running is his preferred mode of transportation; in March, three men with a gun jumped in his car and forced him out as they sped off.

To see U.S. women’s teams in soccer, softball and basketball on the top step of the awards stand - gold medals that didn’t get milked for Nielsens the way gymnastics did, but were far more joyous.

To see Mike Powell, injured but desperate to catch Carl Lewis on his last long jump, sprawled face-first in the pit, weeping, caked head-to-toe in sand.

To see the brothers Zhabrailov locked in combat on the same wrestling mat - Lucman for Moldova, Elmadi for Kazakhstan, both orphaned by the breakup of the Soviet Union.

To see the relentless precision of Chinese diver Fu Mingxia, the earnest seriousness of Kenya’s overmatched rookie archers, the controlled rage of Michael Johnson running the curve.

To see Tonga’s 310-pound Paea Wolfgram club a confused Cuban around the boxing ring, eventually to wind up with a silver medal, a first for his native archipelago. All the island country’s dignitaries phone their support: “The prime minister,” said Wolfgram, “parliament and my mother.”

To see Jackie Joyner-Kersee hobble off the track one event into the heptathlon and to see her return a week later to claim an improbable bronze in the long jump.

To see flags used as shawls, towels and handkerchiefs. To see German weightlifter Ronny Weller toss his wooden-soled shoes into the crowd after breaking a world record, only to have Russia’s Andrey Chemerkin push it higher and snatch away the gold.

To see Muhammad Ali given another gold medal to replace the one he once tossed in a river after America refused him service at a lunch counter.

Atlanta ‘96 wasn’t all one endless vignette for Bud Greenspan’s lens. Boxers bitched about raw deals, Linford Christie petulantly refused to leave the track, two Russians won bronze medals in swimming and wrestling with the help of creative pharmacy and got off because the drug hadn’t made the banned list yet. Carl Lewis went from has-been to distinguished legend to cheesy manipulator in the space of 24 hours.

And, yes, these were the McLympics, starting with the giant french fry carton that housed the flame, and the Coca-Colympics. Alas, if you were trapped on a MARTA train bound for a Dream Team game, it wasn’t the Mennen Speed Sticklympics.

“It’s too big,” sighed decathlon great Bob Mathias, whose Olympic highlights used to be seen on matinee newsreels and not in prime time. “It’s like having the Super Bowl for 17 straight days.”

The difference being this: something interesting, something thrilling, something heart-tugging, something joyful, something horrible, something meaningful happened each of those 17 days.

And will happen again four years from now in Sydney, where they should torch Atlanta’s blueprints but keep the guest list.

You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review