Games Lost in Cyberspace, IBM Site Is Slow and Messy

Before the 1996 Olympic Games began, it was announced as a technological breakthrough. For the first time, using the World Wide Web, millions of people around the world would have direct access to Olympic results and other information as if they were in Atlanta.

Well, guess what. If the Internet is all hype, the official 1996 Olympic Games Web site (www.atlanta.olympic.org) is par for the course.

Operated by IBM and the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, the site is a microcosm of the Net. It is an anarchic mess, rich with information and misinformation about the Olympics. It is slow moving, unwieldy, nonuser friendly and too often unavailable.

Thanks to IBM's ambitious attempt to make these the most electronically advanced Olympics ever, many of the most basic services have not worked. Particularly the reception of the event results.

Why all this failure?

"It's like having a baby," said Ronda Rattray, the Atlanta committee's content coordinator for the site. "You plan and you prepare, but you don't know until you get there that all of a sudden you've got twins. Then you've got to back up and start readjusting."

IBM and the Atlanta Olympic committee were caught by both the massive amount of information to be transferred to the Web site and by the number of users logging on. Rattray said the latest report showed the home page was accessed 7 million times and the results page 5 million times in a single day.