The 1996 Summer Olympics, known officially as the Games of the XXVI Olympiad and unofficially as the Centennial Olympic Games, was a major international multi-sport event that took place in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, from July 19 to August 4, 1996. A record 197 nations, all current IOC member nations, took part in the Games, comprising 10,318 athletes. The International Olympic Committee voted in 1986 to separate the Summer and Winter Games, which had been held in the same year since 1924, and place them in alternating even-numbered years, beginning in 1994. The 1996 Summer Games were the first to be staged in a different year from the Winter Games. Atlanta became the fifth American city to host the Olympic Games and the third to hold a Summer Olympic Games.

Atlanta was selected on September 18, 1990, in Tokyo, Japan, over Athens, Belgrade, Manchester, Melbourne, and Toronto at the 96th IOC Session. Atlanta's bid to host the Summer Games that began in 1987 was considered a long-shot, since the U.S. had hosted the Summer Olympics 12 years earlier in Los Angeles. Atlanta's main rivals were Toronto, whose front-running bid that began in 1986 seemed almost sure to succeed after Canada had held a successful 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, and Melbourne, Australia, who hosted the 1956 Summer Olympics and prior to Sydney, Australia's successful 2000 Summer Olympics bid, they felt that the Olympic Games should return to Australia. This would be Toronto's fourth failed attempt since 1960 (tried in 1960, 1964, and 1976). The Athens bid was based on the fact that 1996 marked 100 years since the first Summer Games in Greece in 1896, though Athens would eventually host the 2004 Summer Olympics. The initial push for 1996 coming to Atlanta came from Billy Payne and then Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, whose main push for the Olympics to come to Atlanta mainly came from a motivation to showcase a changed and resurgent American South which was overcoming racial tensions from the African American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and to showcase a robust and growing Southern economy to help offset international stereotypes that the region was still plagued with poverty.

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