It started with a simple “what if” question while Atlanta officials were working on a bid to host the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.
A group of amateur kayakers from the city began asking themselves: “What if Atlanta’s bid is successful? Then where would the Olympic whitewater canoe and kayak races be held?”
To some of the members of that group, the answer was obvious. Each weekend, to satisfy their thrill seeking desires, they would kayak along a stretch of the Ocoee River in Polk County, just north of the Tennessee-Georgia border about 70 miles east of Chattanooga.
For them, the site in East Tennessee was a no-brainer, but convincing everyone from the local whitewater outfitting businesses to the International Olympic Committee to hold the Olympic events there turned out to be a task somewhat like paddling upstream against a raging current.
Yet it happened. And 20 years ago, the first and only Olympic events ever held in Tennessee took place in a remote forested area that’s only accessible by a two-lane highway.
There were many heroes in the effort: Local, state and federal government officials who provided the funding and other necessary support. Architects and engineers who designed and built an Olympic-worthy course within what was usually a dry river bed. Employees at Lee University who scrambled to upgrade their facilities to accommodate the athletes, coaches and their entourages in a makeshift Olympic village. And thousands of local residents who volunteered their services in numerous ways, large and small, to make the events as glitch-free and spectator-friendly as possible.
Without the grassroots efforts of those kayaking enthusiasts, though, it’s very likely that there wouldn’t have been any Olympic whitewater events that year on the Ocoee River or anywhere else.
When they first started talking about their idea, they were met with skepticism from many different quarters. There were businesses that outfitted rafters along the river who worried that the Olympics might disrupt their rental revenues. The United States Canoe and Kayak Team wasn’t sure it wanted to get involved in whitewater events since doing so might divert resources and attention from its slack water racing program. Tennessee state officials were reluctant to commit funding because they weren’t convinced the project was feasible.
The grassroots advocates wouldn’t give up. They eventually won over the outfitters and the U.S. Canoe and Kayak Team. One of the grassroots group’s members, an accountant at KPMG Peat Marwick named Tim Kelly, persuaded his employer to conduct a feasibility study that helped convince state officials to fund the project.
There were many other rocky shoals that had to be negotiated throughout the approval process. The Atlanta Olympic Committee was so bogged down in other details after winning its bid to host the games that it would only agree to include the whitewater events if someone else paid all the bills and did all the legwork. The International Olympic Committee was at best indifferent and possibly even hostile toward the notion of having whitewater events on the Ocoee.
So the grassroots organizers, led by Joellen Dickey, formed a nonprofit organization called the Ocoee Region Canoe and Kayak Association to finance and host other international competitions along the Ocoee to demonstrate the river’s potential as an Olympic venue. Among the events the organization hosted there was the 1993 world cup of whitewater racing.
Eventually, the local and international Olympic officials relented and agreed to include the whitewater events on the Ocoee as part of the 1996 games. The project still required the cooperation of the U.S. Forest Service, which owned the land where the proposed venue was to be located, and TVA, which controlled the flow of water along the river.
Despite a rivalry between the two federal agencies, they came together in support of the project. There were also rivalries between Polk County residents who lived over Big Frog Mountain and those who lived below the mountain, but those, too, were set aside in the interest of getting Olympic glory.
When the events were held in the summer of 1996, the community saw an immediate benefit. About 42,000 visitors descended on Polk County during the three days of competition, which also attracted a worldwide television audience. To this day, there are hotels, cabins, restaurants and outfitters located in the area that some people attribute to the afterglow of the Olympics.
All because a small but determined group of people wouldn’t let go of their dreams and take ‘no’ for an answer. If they handed out Olympic medals for perseverance, that group would have stood proudly on the winners’ podium 20 years ago.
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Blake Fontenay is the coordinator of the Tri-Star Chronicles project at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. To view Tri-Star’s story, photos and videos about the 1996 Olympic events on the Ocoee River, go to: http://sos.tn.gov/tsla/tri-star-chronicles-shooting-rapids