On July 25, all that will be history. In the Olympic Stadium atop Montjuic-built in 1929-the first Summer Olympiad of the new world order will open. And the city will learn again the truth of the folk wisdom that you must be careful about what you pray for-because you might get it. Now, says Mayor Pasqual Maragall, the risk is that the Games “could die from success.”
Barcelona just isn’t the city that it used to be-and that’s a tribute to careful planning. The good old parts are still there and gleaming: the fluid, fanciful facades erected by the modernists of 90 years ago; the medieval spires and narrow alleys of the Gothic quarter, now laced with new museums and boutiques. But the claustrophobia that used to be part of the city’s ambience, trapped as it was between the mountains and the fetid port, has disappeared. Decaying slums have been ripped away to be replaced by new apartments and a pair of skyscrapers that look like a giant gate to the Mediterranean. Litter-strewn rocks have been buried under man-ma beaches. A ring road has relieved the city’s chronic traffic jam, and giant art works have erupted in the parks. All in the name of sport.
The Games have always been a political stage, but this Olympiad is being mobbed by a new cast of countries and hordes of bit players. “The number of sports, athletes, trainers journalists, broadcasters-we are breaking the records in everything,” says Pedro Fontana, operations director of the Barcelona Olympic Organizing Committee. In all, about 115,000 accreditations are anticipated. “You know, I’m kind of fed up with records,” says Fontana, “but I’m optimistic.”
A total of 173 National Olympic Committees will participate, which is more than in any previous Olympics-and more than the number of nations that existed two years ago. The city had planned to accommodate roughly 15,000 athletes and coaches. Now it’s being asked to take in 19,000, and there just isn’t room. “We are going to stick to 15,000,” says Maragall.
Some of this athletic inflation was spawned by the end of cold-war confrontations and the breakup of the Soviet bloc. But there’s also the appeal of a free holiday. “For the first time,” Fontana notes, the teams will get free room and board. Fifteen days of no-cost sun and sports by the sea, he suggests, is irresistible to “tourist athletes” from countries that are short on (a) cash or (b) suntans. Morocco, Romania and Poland, for instance, want to more than double the size of their contingents in the last Olympics. So do Holland and Denmark.
America’s pampered professionals may not be so enthusiastic. Barcelona tends to have hot, humid summers, which many locals cope with by simply leaving in August. Hence there is little air conditioning in normal apartments, and none in the Olympic Village. Nor does the village have the traditional balconies and awnings that city residents use to relieve the Mediterranean heat.
The organizers appear unperturbed by the prospect of athletes sweating as much in their beds as they do on the field. “It’s our way of life,” says Maragall. When in Barcelona, Fontana insists, visitors should do as Barcelonans do. “At home I can even go naked,” he says. “You open windows, a little air goes through. It works.”
The presence of the Olympics will send a little air rippling through Catalonia itself. The region’s 6 million people are at once famously outward-looking and notoriously chauvinistic. They are eager to promote Barcelona as an international city, yet they also insist on using Catalan, a determinedly provincial tongue, in their schools, many public documents and as one of the Games’ four official languages.
Since 1986, when the city finally won the right to hold the Games, there’s been “a certain feeling that it was due,” says Maragall, “that we deserve it.” Yet many Catalans still are not satisfied. Between Barcelona’s city administration and the Spanish government in Madrid (both run by the Socialist Party) the Catalan nationalists fear that their region-their country, as it were-will be sidelined. And nothing brings out chauvinism like sports. When the refurbished Olympic Stadium was first opened, in 1989, locals hissed the Spanish king, Juan Carlos, and booed Spain’s anthem. More recently, when the World Football League uses the stadium for the home games of the Barcelona Dragons, a huge banner in the stands proclaims FREEDOM FOR CATALONIA.
That’s not likely to happen before July, and perhaps not ever-a fact of realpolitik that wrankles the small but influential separatist movement. Besides using the Catalan language, the organizers have made only vague promises of a Catalan “presence” in the Games. “Will we be like the Indians riding around in Calgary [at the 1988 Winter Games]?” asks Albert Bertrana of the pro-independence Esquerra Republicana party. If Guam and Monaco get to carry their flags, why not Catalonia? Without some concessions, he suggests, “this could be the humiliation of the Catalan people in their own house: a spectacle that says Catalonia doesn’t exist, even as a ‘sports’ nation.” Humiliation, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Esquerra Republicana’s leaders threaten protests but say they want a solution that will not embarrass them or their countrymen.
The Games can live with marches and signs. More frightening is the memory of the Munich Summer Games in 1972, when Palestinian terrorists massacred Israeli athletes. This time resurgent nationalism from Indonesia to Ireland has made security more complex than ever. Most threatening is the Basque group ETA. Its rebels are fighting for the independence of territories on the Atlantic, hundreds of miles away. But they have focused recent attacks on police and officials in the Barcelona area. In March, French authorities arrested ETA’s leadership, yet many members remain at large. “The organization is decapitated,” says a spokesman for the Spanish security forces, “but it’s not eliminated.”
Police officials say they intend to be discreet during the Games. “We don’t want to succumb to militarization,” as one puts it. But by late July the number of police and gendarmes in Catalonia will be doubled to 30,000, plus 6,000 soldiers and plenty of sophisticated hardware to back them up. Barcelona’s port will be dotted with sonar buoys and patrolled by mini-submarines. Helicopters are supposed to transmit real-time images of streets and rooftops to a command center staffed by Spain’s senior police officials.
But for now, at least, the city is more than relaxed. Long meals and late nights remain the norm, and polities, like sports, is something to talk about over a glass of cava or a cafe cortado. To whom do the Games belong? Juan Bayen, proprietor of a popular lunch counter in the Boqueria market, responds with a bartender’s diplomacy: “For us here in the city they’re Barcelona’s. For Catalans they’re Catalonia’s, and for the rest of the world, they’re Spains.”
More likely-and as they should-these Games will belong to everyone.
