Miguel de Moragas and Miguel Botella, Editors

The Keys to

The social, sporting, economic

and Communications impact of

Barcelona992

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The Keys to SuccessThe Social, Sporting, Economic

and Communication Impactof Barcelona '92

The Keys to SuccessThe Social, Sporting, Economic

and Communication Impactof Barcelona '92

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The contents of this book cannot be reproduccd,neither ¡n whole ñor in part, wilhout the previouswritten consent of the authors.

© Centre d'Estudis Olímpics i de l'EsportUniversitat Autónoma de BarcelonaEdifici B. 08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona, España)

© Universitat Autónoma de BarcelonaServei de PublicacionsEdifici A. 08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona, España)

Editors: Miquel de Moragas and Miquel BotellaEditorial coordination: Miquel Gómez, EstherMartí and Nuria GarcíaTranslations: Jcffrcy Swartz, Matlhew TreeCover Design: Josep Maria Trias

First edition: November 1995

Legal Deposit: B. 44.139-1995ISBN 84-490-0450-0Photocomposition: Víctor Igual, S. L.Printing: Dúplex, S. A.Binding: Encuademaciones Maro, S. A.Printed in Spain

Table of Contents

Joan Antoni SamaranchPresiden/ of'the I n t e r n a t i o n a l Olympic C o m m i t t e e . . . 7

PresentationPasqual MaragallPresiden! ofthe COOB '92Mayor of Barcelona 9

IntroductionJosep Miquel AbadCouncillor Delégate ofthe COOB '92A S u m m a r y o f t h e A c t i v i t i e s o f t h e C O O B ' 9 2 . . . . 1 1

O r g a n i z a t i o n o f t h e G a n t e sM i q u e l B o t e l l aT h e K e y s t o S u c c e s s o f t h e B a r c e l o n a G a m e s . . . . 18

SportsEnric TrunoBarcelona, City of Sport 43

Manuel LlanosThe Participaron of the Spanish Olympic Committee inthe Success of 1992 57

MÍISS MediaMiquel de Moragas/Nancy Rivenburgh/ Nuria GarcíaTelevisión and the Construction of Identity:Barcelona, Olympic Host 76

Muriel Ladrón de Guevara/Xavier Cóller/ Daniel RomaníThe Image of Barcelona '92 in the International Press . 107

The Paralympic Games of Barcelona '92Fernand LandryParalympic Games and Social Integration 124

PoliticsJoan BotellaThe Política Games: Agents and Strategies in the 1992Barcelona Olympic Games 139

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SocietyFaustino Miguélez/Pilar CarrasquerThe Repercussion of the Olympic Games on Labour . . 149

Andreu ClapésThe Volunteers of Barcelona '92: The Great Festivalof Participation 165

John MacAloonBarcelona '92: the Perspective of Cultural Anthropology. 181

Urban PlanningLluís MilletThe Games of the City 188

EconomicsFerran BrunetAn Economic Analysis of the Barcelona'92 OlympicGames: Resources, Financing, and Impact 203

TechnologyJordi Lópe77Ferran PastorBarcelona '92: Strategies of Technology 238

Josep BertránThe Technological Image of the Barcelona Olympic Games 254

EpilogueFidel SustGeneral Director of Sports of the Generalitat of CatalunyaThe Sports Legacy of the Barcelona Games 261

Bibliography of Barcelona '92Dolors Aparicio 266

AppendixCentre for Olympic and Sport Studies.International Olympic Chair.Barcelona Olympic Foundation 276

BARCELONA '92: THE PERSPECTIVE OF CULTURALANTHROPOLOGY

JOHN MACALOON1

As with any great public work of art, it is impossible toanticípate the social and political consequences of the Barce-lona Ólympiad so soon after its conclusión. These effects willtake years to know for the various sectors of Barcelonan, Ca-talán, and Spanish society, not to speak of social actorsaround the world. From the perspective of internationalanthropology, there was no one Barcelona Olympics, but rat-her thousands of them, as many as there were cultural com-munities interpreting the Games. Reduction of these múlti-ple discourses to some «bottom-line» statements can benothing more than an imperialist appropriation of the worldto one or another parochial point of view.

At the same time, an irresistible demand for such state-ments is created by an alliance of powerful forces: the hostcommunity's need to justify its enormous investment; theOlympic Movement's claims of universalism; the illusions ofmodern cosmopolitanism and modern science; contempo-rary talk of globalization with its mistaken assumption thatforms of transnational interconnection like mass media, bigbusiness, sports, security operations, mass spectacles, artconnoisseurship, and tourism lead inevitably to standardi-zed meanings. The logic of the contemporary «world sys-tem» is in fact quite different. Interconnection and diversi-fication are not opposing processes, but rather two sides ofthe same intercultural coin.

Some social and political significances associated withthe Barcelona Olympics are already recognizable and will beimplicated in institutional appropriations of these Olympicsanywhere. But like stones thrown in the pond of world af-fairs, there can be no predicting what the wave patterns willlook like as they reach and rebound from various and distantshores. I will comment on two such representations: the city

1. Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Social SciencesMaster's Degree Program at the University of Chicago. International Professorof Olympic Studies for 1995.

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itself with its cult of modernist urbanism, and the nation-sta-te form in global perspective. These two themes are related,but dialectically and multiply so. They array social diversitiesof history, conception, and experience around themselves,including important diversities within Europe and «theWest». Indeed, expression of these themes in Barcelona offe-red an important temporal disruption, a transgressive explo-sión of the intended celebration of linear social progress atthe end of the twentieth century. While themes like post-communism, the end of the cold war and apartheid, and Eu-ropean unification pointed toward the potential politicalnovelty of the future, the ideological and performative repre-sentations of nation-state and city in Barcelona revealed howprofoundly nineteenth-century our logics of social Ufe re-main.

A preliminary review of Olympic media coverage, espe-cially outside of Western continental Europe, shows strikingagreement that the city of Barcelona itself was the star of theGames. Naturally, at all Olympics, attention is focused onthe character of the host city and its culture, but 1992 was so-mething quite unusual. Foreign journalists, no less than fo-reign sport fans, sport workers, academics, and general tou-rists, seem ed to be talking more about the city than aboutany particular Olympic controversy, ceremony, or sportsevent. In a sense, Barcelona upstaged the Olympics, thoughin another sense the Olympics created this «Barcelona».

The features of the city singled out in these commentariesvary, of course, with the cultures and conditions of the spea-kers. Middle-class visitors from disorgani/ed urban sprawlslike Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Athens, and Bombaymarvelled at the compactness and ease of getting around inBarcelona. Foreigners from uhom vast street crowds athome are unusual, worrisome, or even frightening repea-tedly commented on the scores of thousands of ordinary citi-zens who turned up nightly on Montjuíc for no other reasonthan to be among everyone else. The nightly flows of peopleon the Ramblas, and the fatt that the sociability of eveningextended so quickly and deeply in to the wee morning hours,attracted participation and special social rapport from per-sons in whose home environments pleasures are taken indoorsand «the streets are rolled up» at midnight.

For many visitors, this code of seeing and being seenbrought the people and the material city of Barcelona into acommon expression of spectacle logic. The aesthetic beau-ties of Barcelona's great vistas and her intímate alleys, thecleanliness of even poorer neighborhoods (to the extent that

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any Olympic visitors saw them), and the general sense of acity that evidently cares for how it looks through the appa-rent competence of social services: such themes repeat them-selves in foreign commentary, often in the end crowding outthe shock and suffering of foreigners and locáis alike becau-se of extraordinary prices and price-gouging. Even where itbordered on narcissistic parochialism, the extreme self-cons-ciousness of Barcelonans and Catalans about their built en-vironment was another factor singled out for positive noticeby foreign commentators.

In the early days of the Games, some international offi-cials and Olympic aficionados complained of it seemingmore like «the Barcelona and Catalonia Expo» than theOlympic Games. The victories of Spanish athletes helpedchange all that, drawing local populations who had appearednot to care about sport at all into the stadiums and in front oftelevisión sets, in full view of foreigners moving in the oppo-site direction, having come for the Games and being drawninto the city. This public meeting of guest and host popula-tions, while both were so fully in passage, was unprecedentedin my experience of summer Olympic Games. I believe it iswhat will be remembered about Barcelona for those whowere there, long after the outcomes of this or that competi-tion or the grandiose entertainments of the opening ceremo-nies have been forgotten.

Domestic and foreign talk often seemed to constitute Bar-celona as a free and autonomous entity in the world, therebyrevealing the endurance of a feature of eighteenth and nine-teenth-century utopianism, when the great city had not yetbeen so throughly brought to heel by the encompassingnation-state. Today, however, such civic attainments arethroughly dependent upon political identities, parties, andformations irrevocably tied to nationalist discourse. Just so,the oíd panhumanisms of European modernism —whethersocialist, liberal, or romantic— which lie at the core of Olym-pism, established transnational entities like the IOC and theUN, and emergent forms like the EC cannot make any appea-rance without direct reference to the world of nation-states.The new alliance between the global and the local cannot yetdetach itself from the national, and available models of na-tion-ness remain firmly embedded in the past.

These facts were symbolized repeatedly in Barcelona inthe «battles of the flags». In the streets, shop windows, bars,restaurants, stadiums, government and COOB offices, inter-national installations, and lobbies of official hotels, the flagsof the IOC, EC, Spain, Catalonia, Barcelona and the COOB

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(joined in some context by the banners of Catalán indepen-dence) were forced to dance with each other. Sometimes thedance was a happy sardana, sometimes a wary modernist ba-llet, and sometimes a violently postmodern slam-dance. Noexpression of identity and ownership, however joyful, wentuncontested or unmediated by the others. It is under the all-surveying eye that sociopolitical identities feel the greatestfear of exclusión.

At the end of the Games, IOC President Samaranch re-marked «that the world now knew that Spain was not theculture of siestas and mañana». But who was «the world»supposedly benighted by such stereotypes? I for one have ne-ver met Koreans, Indians, Indonesians, or Kenyans who sha-red them. North Americans? If so, then not Spain but the farmore relevant Hispanic cultures of México, Central andSouth America are those to be defended. To the extent thatSpain itself has remained on the popular cultural map ofNorth Americans, the stereotypes to worry about are pro-bably not those of indolence but of the «black lie» in both itsearly modern and mid-20th century versions. Though he hasreason to be only too aware of these, Samaranch did notmention them. Therefore, one cannot help arriving at theconclusión that «the world» Samaranch declared newly en-lightened was really that of Northern Europe. For their parts,other Catalans declared that Samaranch should have said«Catalonia» not «Spain», consonant with the extensive cam-paign on the part of several Barcelonan élites —includingsome Olympic ceremonies designers and certainly the Gene-ralitat— to reassert Catalonia's claim to be the most Europe-an part of Spain.

Though of rather different political formation than Sa-maranch, Barcelona Mayor Pasqual Maragall's marked de-clarations of civic autonomy turned out upon inspection tobe similarly directed. Sounding for all the world like a bigcity Mayor from the country in which he studied to becomethe technocrat he was before politics claimed him, Maragalldeclared on the eve of the Olympics that he wanted Barcelo-na to be remembered above all as «the city that functioned».After the Games, when this desire had been granted in spa-des, he felt freer to specify his real audience. Having proveditself to be a great European city, Maragall declared thatBarcelona should now become «thegreat European city». Ma-ragall's double status as Mayor and Olympics chief, his posi-tions in the EC organization of municipalities, his outreachto the Mayors of war-torn Yugoslavia, and his citation duringthe opening ceremonies of personal requests to him by the

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UN all indícate the new relations between local and transna-tional entities which depend upon nation-state meditationeven as they try to circumvent them. Jordi Pujol tried to takeadvantage of these mediations through the Generalitat'spress campaign seeking to have Catalonia recognized as «acountry in Europe» in major international newspapers. Post-Olympic claims that people around the world now know thatCatalonia is not the same as Spain are probably accurate.But much of the local discourse remained perplexing if notsomewhat irritating to many foreigners. Non-Europeancontingents at the Barcelona Olympics were sometimesmade to feel as if they were intruding upon or being used aspawns in an intra-European conversation. The effect was de-epened by the disinterest (relative to past Olympic Games)shown by COOB, Olympic art organizers, local journalists,and academic élites toward foreign cultures represented intheir midst, in particular the non-European and especiallythe non-Western ones. The important political entailmentsdirected at the EC by representations of a Mediterraneanidentity were accompanied for many South Americans,North Americans, Scandinavians, and British by shock atcertain «Mediterranean» practices with respect to race andgender, at least as these appeared in mainstream newspa-pers. Perhaps more surprising that the «black Sambo» carto-ons, «black/other» medal counts, and surreptitious photo-graphs of women athletes undressing in their OlympicVillage rooms was Catalán and Spanish disinterest in or ina-bility to grasp why things might be offensive to citizens ofmore determinedly creóle and pluralist states. Of course,every Olympic Games results in such cultural imbroglios andpolitical boundary-definitions among host and guest socie-ties. What showed here on a world-historical scale was thecontinuing incommunicability among the different classicalmodels of nationalism: the creóle nationalism of South Ame-rica, the continental European ideal of one state/one ethni-city/one language, the Anglo-Saxon model of many cultu-res/one state, and the hierarchical-wholistic nationalisms ofEast and South Asia.

Deep connections between rival models of the nation-sta-te and the theme of utopian urbanism may compose the dis-tinctive sociopolitical contribution of Barcelona '92. Withoutthe Olympics, the economic capital could not have been ge-nerated so quickly, or maybe at all, to open Barcelona to thesea, refurbish the beaches and the parks, renew the districtsof Valí d'Hebron and Poblé Nou, build the ring road, theCommunications towers, the sports pavillions, the train sta-

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tions, and the airport termináis, or finish any of the other ur-ban infrastructural projects that in the planners' understand-ing have not so much transformed as «completed» the city.(In the discourse of Barcelonan urbanism, it is as if Sert andthe Eixample had been patiently awaiting all these years fortheir wider setting to be realized). The Barcelonan moder-nism of art and architecture differs in important ways fromother European and international modernisms, but in theutopian centralization of its visions, its ethos of making oneintegrated urban environment, it just as surely references thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The ideology isclear even in its official treatment of the peripheral, collarcommunities, within the bounds of the mountains and thesea, yet built for and occupied by working class immigrantsfrom elsewhere in Spain. As HOLSA and city guides like toput it (on marvelous tours which foreign visitors showed lit-tle interest in taking), the ring road and its overlying parkshave had progressive effects, for «central city-dwelling bour-geois now actually see these communities». (Notwithstan-ding subway rides in and out of Barcelona for basketball, fewforeign visitors discovered them).

But as in Seoul (the other major Olympic urban transfor-mation, conducted on an even greater scale than Barcelona),Olympic economic capital could not have been generatedwithout the accompanying political capital provided by thevarious nationalisms. In South Korea, the process was drivenby central national state bureaucracies appealing on the onehand to national emergence into world consciousness fromunder the screen of that Western Orientalism which sup-presses all differences with China and Japan, and, on the ot-her hand, to literally paving the way for reunification withNorth Korea. In Barcelona, by contrast, the political capitalwas generated by a whole series of energi/ing oppositions:between Catalonia and the Spanish state, between the Gene-ralitat and the Ajuntament, between the Catalán bourgeoisieand the immigrant populations, and between the socialists,the center-right, and the radicáis. Far from being the con-sequence of an ancient city and modern technocracy set freefrom all distracting nationalist and anti-nationalist discour-se, the triumphant urbanismo of Barcelona now being cele-brated around the world is the product of these very strug-gles over national identity. Modernism is itself so cultivatedin Barcelona because it is identified with opposition to dicta-torship at the national center and with extramural claims onEuropean status and identity. Thus the dreams of the ratio-nalizing modernists of Barcelona, past and present, remain

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tied to a certain model of nation-ness which in turn appealsfor legitimation to certain transnational cultural formationsand (with the EC) political institutions. Here is a paradigmrevealed for us in the Barcelona experience. Brasilia, the ra-tional utopian capital of a proudly creóle state was now soli-citing the millennial Olympic Games in hope of overcomingthe North/South divide. It's rivals included Manchester andBeijing. Manchester sought to renew itself as an internatio-nal multicultural city on the ruins of the industrial ratioanli-ties which gave it birth. Beijing wished to transform itself asSeoul did, but in the logic of the exemplary center of hierar-chical nationalism in special reference to the agencies ofOrientalism and the cold war. In the end, the «new» city ofSydney won the prize. While related, indeed because they arerelated, these logics are extremely different from another. Theparadigm not only makes interconnection possible, it com-mands differentiation and diversity. How but on the groundof difference can the IOC decide? This is an IOC itself, itmust be added, that in its politically opportune but riskilyprecedent-setting decisions in Barcelona about who is allo-wed to be represented as a nation, showed itself to be despe-rately in need of greater self-consciousness about the «worldsystem» of which it is a part.

With recognition of the true paradigm of intercultural re-lations in the world system today, is not the next step to dis-cover whether and how partisans of one model can remaincommitted to it while nevertheless coming to more seriousrecognition and consideration of the other models construc-ted to similar ends by the peoples of the world? The signifi-cance of Barcelona for the future was to make this challengeabundantly clear as well.

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