But we were about to change all that and learn how to plan coverage years out - in this case, five.

Now, few cities in the United States will have a chance to host the Olympics, but all things being relative, you will have what you deem big and important events to cover. However you define big and important, once you have designated an event as such, begin planning immediately.

Our newsroom gained control of the newspaper's preparations by appointing an assistant managing editor to head up planning and ongoing coverage five years out. No other department appointed anyone that far out and certainly not at that level. The newsroom was so far out front in its planning that when the rest of the newspaper began to get serious about its Olympics duties, another newsroom AME was appointed chairman of the building-wide Olympic Operations committee.

We led the charge that determined or affected every aspect of the newspapers' Olympic effort - from deadlines and press runs to circulation and marketing, from new products, such as six monthly magazines, to systems.

Our strategy was a simple one: become the unofficial newspaper of record for the Olympics. By that, we didn't just mean the Atlanta Games. We meant the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, in short, the Olympic movement.

Not only did we want to "play" in the Olympic movement, but to demonstrate our commitment. The hometown newspaper is not accorded any special rights, and the IOC and USOC are quick to point this out. The local organizers also loved to point out that the Olympics was not a local story, so they, too, refused to grant us special privileges. (Later, our commitment would prove overwhelmingly convincing when we were awarded 117 credentials - the most ever accorded a newspaper.)

Implementing such a strategy meant making a major commitment - in staff, money and newsprint.

Along with an AME, two of the newsroom's better reporters were assigned full time to Olympic coverage in 1991. In 1992, we moved our executive sports editor to Olympics full time.

We probably missed visiting a few of the 197 countries that sent teams to Atlanta, but not many. We logged hundreds of thousands of miles visiting every continent except Antarctica. In five years, we spent close to $1 million on travel, which included sending a team of 24 to Barcelona, Spain, and 16 to Lillehammer, Norway. These trips served us on many levels - we were gaining individual and institutional knowledge of just how big and wide-ranging the Atlanta Games would be, and we were gaining the contacts we needed to be ahead on all stories Olympic.

And our coverage philosophy was as simple as our strategy: We would cover everything - from the IOC, USOC and the Atlanta organizing committee to marketing agreements and TV negotiations to venue construction, neighborhood reclamations, and of course, the athletes.

That philosophy carried over into our coverage of the 1996 Games. Besides the sports, we would cover everything - from traffic to tickets, from celebrities to concerts, from fans to weather, from the Olympic Arts Festival to pin trading.

Planning at all levels

Our 12 senior Olympics editors began meeting every other week two years before the Games. Six months before the Games, we began meeting weekly.

This provided many benefits:

• We were able to select our entire team of 320-plus journalists two years out. This, in turn, allowed our reporters to begin developing expertise on beats they don't cover. Many news reporters were selected to cover a sport they didn't know anything about, and even our sports department lacked expertise in such Olympic events as water polo or field hockey or fencing.

• A plan to complete 55 sports and venue graphics by the end of 1995. While we missed the target date by a couple of months, the real goal was accomplished: We weren't doing these graphics, which obviously could be completed ahead of time, as the Olympics neared, or worse, during the Olympics. (Our graphics plan called for using these graphics more than once and in many ways - many ran in some version in our daily during trial events as far out as 11 months before the Games, most ran in our Guide to the Games magazine, and some ran yet again during the Games.

• We had real deadlines, page by page, weeks before the Olympics began. This was especially crucial as we were publishing the equivalent of a second newspaper, and we had deadlines that would have been tough if we had only been publishing "one" newspaper. Seventy-eight events ended after 11 p.m. and we got every one of them into our home-delivered newspapers.

• We had real story, photo and graphics budgets for all 30 days in a looseleaf notebook weeks before the Games. While much shuffling took place, we had a game plan, and certainly we never woke up wondering what we were going to put in our sections that day.

• Staff schedules were handed out months in advance and were arranged so that editors and reporters returned to their non-Olympics jobs with no overtime or comp time owed them.

• Everyone (except the copy desk and artists) had either a beeper and/or cell phone assigned to them. This made the difference when a bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park at 1:19 a.m. and we were able to get the story and a full page of photos in an edition for which the presses started at 3:30 a.m. A second edition involved eight additional pages of bomb coverage and then the last edition with more replating rolled off the press at 6:30.

Smart or lucky?

• It begins to build reader interest.
• It alerts readers that you plan extensive coverage.
• It acts as a practice run; you get over the surprises and glitches in time for the main event.

Oliver is assistant managing editor/Olympics for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.