ATLANTA '96 CITY SAYS IT IS ALMOST READY TO RISE.

Byline: Melissa Turner Atlanta Constitution-Journal

The year of the Olympics.

In just under 200 days, three minutes before sunset, the giant countdown clock in the new Olympic stadium will tick down to zero. President Clinton will declare open the Games of the XXVIth Olympiad.

Billy Payne and his Olympians have just over six months to finish building the stage and planning the production of the Olympic world's Centennial celebration and Atlanta's biggest event since Sherman burned the place to the ground in 1864.

Payne sees this final year as one of redemption, not worry.

"It is refreshing as an organization to feel that this is really the year that we now must do what we said we would do," he says at the dawn of his last year as president of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.

In many big ways, it looks as if he and his Olympic team will do just that.

More than a half-billion dollars worth of new sports facilities and college dormitories are nearly completed. Television rights and sponsorships have sold for record numbers. All but about $200 million of the once seemingly insurmountable budget is under contract and the books are likely to balance. More tickets have already been sold - with nearly 4 million more still on the market - than for any Olympics in history.

But, by no means is the work done.

Stand on almost any street corner and look in almost any direction. Barricades block torn up chunks of asphalt that once were streets, jackhammers demolish sidewalks; sheets of plywood cover windows and doors on buildings hollowed out for restoration. A sea of red Georgia clay cuts a wide and often watery swatch through a once seedy section of downtown.

But in a few short months, the cranes will disappear and the bulldozers crisscrossing the clay will be replaced by a brick plaza, fountains, trees and grass, and the $50 million Centennial Olympic Park will emerge.

Olympic contractors will complete the last four athletic venues in the coming weeks, including the majestic Olympic Stadium. Although at the stadium, as at all the new and existing sports facilities, there's still Olympic retrofitting to be done, and not much time to do it.

In the stadium, the temporary seats and scoreboard are still to come, as well as special wiring and cables, light towers, temporary restrooms and the "Look of the Games" banners. Workers have less than 72 hours after the Braves complete their July 16 game to outfit Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium for Olympic baseball.

Every available employee will converge on the parking lot between the two stadiums to paint a huge colorful "Look of the Games" quilt pattern on the asphalt. No one knows if it will dry before 15,000 athletes and coaches parade across it into the new stadium for Opening Ceremonies.

"The end of every project is tense, pushing and doing everything we can to meet a date," said Chuck Winstead, Olympic stadium project director. "You can see the light at the end of the tunnel, after a lot of people wondered if we'd ever be there."

But even after it appears to the drive-by public that all is going well, an enormous amount of work must still go on behind the scenes and under the ground. In the final frantic months, organizers will begin installing the operating systems to run the Games. That means laying cables, plugging in telephones, televisions, computers and printers.

One of the trickiest tasks, which, if fouled up, could create a public relations nightmare, is assigning the 12.2 million seats to the Games so ACOG's ticketmeisters know exactly what they've got left to sell.

There's still more than simple details to sweat. After negotiating for well over a year, ACOG and the city have yet to hash out their $13.5 million agreement for municipal services and marketing rights. Ditto for Fulton County, which is expecting ACOG to pay $5 million for services such as stationing deputies at the Marriott Marquis, the official Olympic family hotel during the Games, to protect VIPs.

And it remains to be seen if the 125,000 people who work and live downtown will stay out of their cars and off the streets, so ACOG's new Draconian transportation plan can keep traffic running as smoothly as the nearby Chattahoochee River.

Billy Payne, ever the optimist, is certain the citizenry will embrace the Games in this new, and final, year.

"We're going to feel our passion and our focus of all these years becoming very important to other people," he said. "And even those who have viewed it singularly as an economic opportunity, something to write about or something to criticize, they are going to be drawn up in the excitement, too."

Perhaps, so. But, he's going to have to do some world-class cheerleading. Although a recent poll showed the majority of Atlantans think the Games are a good thing, 24 percent of residents were thinking about leaving town to avoid the crowds and traffic.

Naysayers are still shrill. "We may well be the laughing stock of the world and have the worst Olympic Games in history," grouses David Sorrells of Atlanta, echoing the fears of a few.

And there's no reason to believe social activists will observe seven months of silence. Gay rights groups promise to reignite the fight over suburban Cobb County's ban on their lifestyle; the debate over the Georgia state flag and its Confederate symbolism will only amplify. Oklahomans may have resolved their bickering over the route of the torch relay, but surely the 15,000-mile

run won't now be controversy free.

"I worry about the unknowns," says Dick Yarbrough, managing director of communications. "The things I haven't thought about, whether it be a social issue, a political issue, an international issue."

But Payne doesn't let any of that bother him. This project is pretty much at an end for him, he says. "This has been simply a series of doing things you said you were going to do years in advance to a very cynical and skeptical audience."

So, in the end, if the books balance, the athletes come and compete drugfree, the traffic plan works and terrorists abide by the U.N. sanctioned Olympic truce, and Mother Nature keeps the heat to a minimum, IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch will proclaim these "the best Games ever."

And Billy Payne says: "I'm going to say 'Well, I'll be darned!"