No Games Tickets? Maybe Vidalia-Onion Dressing Will Give You Olympic Spirit

ATLANTA - No tickets for the 1996 Olympics? Buy a bottle of Vidalia-onion salad dressing with the Games logo on the label instead.

Or feel the Olympic spirit with a pair of black boxer shorts adorned with Olympic torches and runners.

Atlanta Olympic officials are counting on worldwide enthusiasm - and a worldwide sales pitch - for Games souvenirs to generate $75 million toward the cost of staging the $1.58 billion event.

"This is the one area where a spectator can become a participant," Robert Hollander, head of licensing for the Atlanta Games, said last week in announcing an expansion of the marketing of souvenirs. "Buying something makes you feel like part of the Games."

Stores in Atlanta have carried Olympic souvenirs for several years, but now, just in time for the Christmas shopping season, the products are going to the rest of the United States and several other countries.

About 110 companies have won permission to plaster the Olympic logo on clothing, toys, gourmet food, sports equipment and other products.

Each sale means a royalty for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. The companies licensed to use the logo have guaranteed ACOG $60 million in royalties, and ACOG hopes a massive marketing effort will boost that figure to $75 million.

The sales strategy: "While not everyone can have a medal, just about everybody can own a little piece of the Olympic Games," Hollander said.

ACOG needs strong sales of souvenirs to make up the $100 million it still lacks to fund the '96 Games.

"You're going to see (Olympic products) in almost every store in the United States between holiday season 1995 and the first of 1996," Hollander said.

In addition to the T-shirts, pins and caps, the line of Olympic merchandise includes beer steins, umbrellas, cocktail napkins, bottled water, briefcases, tins of gourmet biscuits. Prices are set by each store.

An entire line of products is built around Izzy, the fuzzy, blue mascot of the Games: dolls, key chains, basketballs, footballs, playing cards and figurines.

And ACOG officials hope the sight of a larger-than-life Izzy floating down New York's Fifth Avenue again during this year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade will send fans running to stores.

The Olympic clothing items will generate about 60 percent of the sales, but Hollander believes slapping an Olympic logo on bottles of Vidalia-onion salad dressing or salsa also will draw buyers.