Who's On First? p.13

By: mark fitzgerald

IN A STRANGE Olympiad that began with nightmarish transportation and logistical problems that were later compounded by a horrific bombing, harried news organizations could not even be sure they were getting the right results of competitions.
For the first week of the Olympics, the much-hyped Info '96 results reporting system, put together by IBM and the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG), proved less than useless ? in addition to reporting results extremely slow, it was giving wrong information.
Then, an emergency backup plan attempted by the Associated Press foundered almost immediately ? apparently as a result of ACOG's failure to come through with promised help.
And while the IBM system finally steadied itself in the second week of competition, episodes of wrong information continued to rankle journalists.
With so much going on, the last thing newspapers wanted to worry about at the Atlanta Summer Games was the accuracy of their agate.
"It's been anything but a carefree Olympiad," Tim Franklin, the Chicago Tribune's assistant managing editor/sports, said with considerable understatement.
Franklin knew he was in for problems the very first day of the competition when the IBM system failed to post results from judo competition. Those results finally showed up 24 hours later.
Promised biographical sketches of key competitors also failed to show up.
"It made planning and the ability to look ahead to stories very difficult because you didn't have some vital information on competitors who may not be very well-known."
Some of the IBM system errors caught by AP were almost comical: A boxer was described as 21 feet tall, and another was listed as less than 2 feet tall. The computer listed gold medal winners in competitions that had not yet been held.
But these glitches were no laughing matter to AP, which was one of about a dozen subscribers who paid $10,000 for the feed from the ACOG/IBM system. Others included Reuters, United Press International, Agence France Presse and USA Today.
After a week of computer screw ups ? and with the track and field events about to begin ? AP, on July 24, went to the International Olympic Committee to develop an alternative plan for reporting results.
The idea was that ACOG would outfit six volunteers with laptops who would go to the track events and punch in results in a basic newspaper style. That information was to be sent to AP's computer in the main press center for distribution to subscribers of the ACOG/IBM Info '96 system.
So how did that work out?
"It was an utter failure. Abandoned. Never worked out," said Monte Lorell, managing editor of sports for USA Today. Lorell said ACOG failed to provide the agreed number of laptops and volunteers and the plan proved yet another fiasco.
"It never worked well. The laptops were late, they had the wrong people," Lorell said.
USA Today itself sent three data entry workers and three interns to help AP at its main press center headquarters.
Fortunately, the IBM system more or less came together just as the track and field events were beginning, journalists said. While problems continued, they were mostly minor.
In many ways the IBM system was as much a victim of pre-Olympic hype as such American disappointments at the Games as U.S. weightlifter Mark Henry [favorite for gold, finished 14th], the men's and women's indoor volleyball teams [medal favorites, both eliminated in preliminaries] and swimmer Janet Evans [touted for most gold medals ever, failed to make finals in her best event and intimated the winner uses illegal performance-enhancing drugs.]
"This was the most ambitious results reporting undertaking ever," the Chicago Tribune's Franklin said. "I'm not sure in all honesty if [IBM and ACOG] would have come in for all this criticism if their goals had been more modest.
"The problem was, we'd been lead to believe we could do all these fabulous things ? which didn't come true."