Olympics fail to bring home gold for tourism.

• Position: Travel/tourism industry in North Carolina - Industry Overview

To put it bluntly, the joke was on most everyone in North Carolina who made their living off tourism in 1996. It was going to be a banner year, they were told. Millions of people would be converging on the Southeast for the Atlanta Olympics. Some of them would want to do things en route, organizers said, and they'd do it in North Carolina.

As the games approached, expectations only increased. Leroy Walker, the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee and a former chancellor of N.C. Central University, told tourism and visitors groups that the state could expect a multimillion-dollar dividend from the Olympics.

But someone forgot to tell the tourists, who never showed up. "I call it the 'other game in town' syndrome," says Craig Plocica, a spokesman for Nantahala Outdoor Center in Swain County. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime deal, and a lot of people reallocated their vacation dollars."

In late October, NOC already knew 1996 wasn't going to meet projections, Plocica says, mostly because of a disastrous July. Its rafting trips on the Ocoee River were off 50% that month compared with July 1995.

That's indicative of western North Carolina as a whole, says David Huskins, managing director of the Smoky Mountain Host of North Carolina Inc. tourism bureau in Franklin. "Our indications are that things are anywhere from 8% to 18% off from the previous year, depending on where you are," Huskins says.

Like Plocica, Huskins suspects the Olympics are the culprit. "People may have avoided our area thinking it was more congested than it was. Maybe a lot of people went to Atlanta for a day and didn't make those side trips, or they may have spent a whole week in Atlanta, and that consumed their resources."

Despite this gloomy assessment, the state's travel and tourism revenue was expected to approach $9.6 billion in 1996, up 4% from 1995, says Gene Brothers, an associate professor of parks, recreation and tourism management at N.C. State University. That's less than the 5% annual increase the sector usually posts, he adds, but it's better than it might have been because of the industry's diverse base. Despite the subpar summer, the winter ski season was great, and early indicators are that the fall leaf season was better than average, he says. Even the beaches did fairly well, considering that twin hurricanes cast a pall over two of the biggest weekends in the season.

First was Bertha, which started brewing the week of July 4th. It didn't hit until a week...