Olympic gold
Barcelona is widely considered to have hosted one of the best planned and most successful Olympics of all time. Between July 25th and August 9th, 1992, a Mediterranean metropolis that had suffered decades of neglect under Franco’s rule, was suddenly catapulted into the world's consciousness. Twenty-five years on, the Olympic legacy still has an impact on Barcelona’s economy, its urban environment and, above all, its people.
Pre-Olympic Barcelona
When Franco died in 1975, the beleaguered region of Catalunya breathed a collective sigh of relief. Power was gradually handed back to parts of Spain that had been repressed since the end of the civil war, and in Barcelona, a city that had been deliberately starved of investment by the Fascist regime, plans were put into place to reinvigorate and modernise the city.
Decades of uncontrolled migration and chaotic urban planning had resulted in immense overcrowding and the emergence of shantytowns (known as barracas) along Barcelona’s seafront, around Montjuïc and on undeveloped wasteland. Abandoned industrial units littered Poblenou, and an obtrusive combination of railways and busy roads divided the city from a coastline that had become little more than a refuse dump. This was a post-industrial urban environment that was crying out for a bit of TLC.
So, when local democracy was reinstated, there was a real desire to provide Barcelona’s people with new leisure spaces, public services and improved infrastructure. Set up to carry out research and improve knowledge of ‘Olympism and sport’ in the run up to the Games, the Centre d’Estudis Olímpics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (CEO-UAB) explained that this modernisation process had already started in 1979. Barcelona’s Olympic nomination, however, brought about a radical change in the scale of the whole project.
An impetus for change
With that historic announcement on October 17th, 1986, one of the most ambitious urban regeneration projects in modern history was put into action. In an article for Transfer Magazine in 2010, Josep Maria Montaner, respected Catalan architect and author, highlighted how the Olympic nomination “provided the opportunity and the impulse Barcelona needed to modernise and to make up for lost time and become a modern and well-equipped city”.
The Olympic Committee was determined to up the scale of the projects that had been in the pipeline since the late Seventies. Until the nomination, Barcelona’s urban planners had spoken of redeveloping squares, streets and gardens; afterwards, they set their sights higher and began to dream of harbours, ring roads and an Olympic village. They knew they had the chance to change the face of the city forever.
The funding required for these impressive urban plans could not come exclusively from the public purse. Pasqual Maragall, esteemed mayor of Barcelona from 1982 to 1997, sought to form a new alliance between the city’s traditionally socialist-leaning administration and the private sector. Without the combination of public funding and private investment that he secured, the Olympic project would barely have gotten off the ground. Thus, as the cranes went up from Vall d'Hebron to Poblenou, a tangible sense of excitement crept into the people of Barcelona.
This was cemented when, at the city’s 1988 La Nit festival, Freddie Mercury gave a spine-tingling rendition of the epic ‘Barcelona’ alongside city native Montserrat Caballé. This was Freddie Mercury’s last ever live performance, and the song would go on to provide the most emotive Olympic soundtrack in history.
The world at your door
From the opening ceremony onwards, Barcelona ’92 was filled with iconic displays of unity. As the Olympic flag was hoisted in the stadium, Spanish tenor Alfredo Kraus sung the official ‘Olympic Hymn’ in both Spanish and Catalan, capturing the hearts of the local audience. These were the first games in which a post-apartheid South Africa, a unified Germany and a post-Soviet Russia were able to compete. Barcelona welcomed athletes from 169 different countries—10 more than Seoul in 1988.
Some of the Games’ most memorable moments included Spanish Paralympian Antonio Rebollo igniting the Olympic flame with a burning arrow; the USA men's basketball team romping to gold with an NBA ‘dream team’, featuring Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson; Fermín Cacho securing Spain’s first-ever gold medal for a running event in the 1,500 metres; and the men’s Spanish football team winning gold in a sold-out Camp Nou.
The whole city played a part in the action, with four distinct areas hosting the venues and events: Diagonal, which included Camp Nou; Montjuïc, where the Olympic Stadium was located; Vall d'Hebron; and Parc de Mar, centred around the modern-day Port Olímpic. Further events took place elsewhere in the region, with road cycling, handball, boxing and football hosted in venues that spread all the way from Valencia to Vic.
And it wasn’t just Barcelona that was gripped by Olympic fever. With state-of-the-art facilities, flawless organisation and a completely re-energised city before them, the world could see that Barcelona was open for business.
An Olympic legacy
On the silver anniversary of the Games, the Olympic legacy is lauded not only for the changes made to Barcelona’s urban environment and its economy, but also for its impact on sport in the region. Spain’s unexpected success at the Games (they won an unprecedented 13 gold medals) inspired a new generation to participate in grassroots sports. New clubs and facilities sprung up all over the city and people were getting involved in greater numbers than ever before.
A variety of superb facilities were built for the Olympics, many of which have since attracted elite international sports competitions to Barcelona, such as the 2010 European Athletics Championships. Some venues, the Velodrom d’Horta and the Piscina Municipal de Montjuïc, for example, have been open to the public ever since. This combination of inspiration and investment spurred the city on to produce some of Spain’s most renowned sporting heroes in the years since the Games.
Badalona-born Mireia Belmonte cemented her position as Spain’s greatest swimmer with her gold medal in the 200-metre butterfly at the Rio Olympics; Pau and Marc Gasol have inspired a generation of budding basketballers with their success in the NBA; and from 2008-12 a team that included many Barcelona natives took the footballing world by storm, winning 14 trophies in four seasons under the stewardship of a ’92 Olympic hero, Pep Guardiola.
It’s not only elite level sport that has experienced an upturn since 1992. Research carried out at CEO-UAB suggests that the Barcelona Olympics helped to bring about a fitness boom in Catalunya and across Spain. Today, the beachfront is packed with people running, cycling, rollerblading and playing volleyball—enjoying leisure spaces that simply didn’t exist until the Olympics came to town.
The changing face of the city
Prior to its Olympic nomination, Barcelona had always been known as ‘the city with its back to the sea’. A tightly packed neighbourhood of shanties hugged the coast all the way from Barceloneta to what we know today as the Fòrum. Thirty-nine-year-old Barcelona native Marta has no problem recalling what this part of the city used to be like. “There was never any kind of beach,” she recalled, with the look of someone still amazed to this day. “It was all just shacks!” Yet it was this stretch of coast that was cherry-picked as the location for one of the most ambitious developments the city had ever seen.
The Olympic Committee laid out plans to construct a new ring road and move the existing railway tracks underground. This revolutionised Barcelona’s transport system. It diverted traffic away from the area and allowed space for the creation of a new, 30-metre-wide pedestrian seafront promenade. The beaches were completely reshaped using sand imported from Egypt, while the old industrial sites were demolished to make way for the new Olympic Village and Olympic Harbour.
“After the Olympics, when we got our city back, going to Vila Olímpica was the thing to do,” said Marta. “We wanted to go and see what was there!” Frank Gehry's imposing ‘El Peix’ sculpture arrived in time for the Games and today it presides over a part of the city that has grown into a veritable tourist hotspot.
Economic turnaround
The economic transformation brought about by the Olympic Games has probably had the biggest impact on Barcelona’s people. Even before its nomination, the city was experiencing a similar trend to that seen elsewhere in Europe. Heavy industry was in decline and the service sector was quickly taking over. In his piece for Transfer Magazine, Montaner argued that “the Olympic Games sped up the conversion of Barcelona into a huge service industry … one of the most important of which was obviously the tourist sector”.
During the Games, Barcelona proved to the international community that it was capable of putting on the perfect Olympics. It had architecture, beaches, great weather and a proud history to boot. The organisers deliberately flaunted this. What nobody expected, however, was quite how successful this transformation would prove to be, and just how drastically it would affect the city. “I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but it’s completely different,” said Victor, 35. “The city’s not really for the people of Barcelona now. It’s trendier, cooler, there’s more fashion. Now you don’t even recognise it.”
Many would argue that he’s right. Twenty-five years after the Olympics, Barcelona is a globally renowned tourist destination. In 2016, the city welcomed more than 20 million visitors (including those on day trips), compared to 1.73 million visitors in 1990.
The transformation of the city’s global image has been undeniably positive. However, the problems associated with mass tourism have been well publicised, and Barcelona’s local government has been forced to take measures to curb its negative effects. Victor acknowledges that a booming tourist industry has brought more jobs to the city, but he is keen to point out that soaring visitor numbers don’t always signify progress. “We were poorer,” he said, “but we were still happy before the Olympics.”
Barcelona ’92 set a benchmark for other host cities. The long-term sporting, urban, economic and cultural impact of the event has served as inspiration for every Olympic Games since. The term ‘Olympic legacy’ was used throughout the bidding process for both London 2012 and Rio 2016, though both cities have since struggled to emulate the success of the ‘Barcelona model’, at least in the short term, with many of Rio’s spectacular venues having sadly fallen into a state of disrepair in just a year.
Barcelona was experiencing such a unique set of political, economic and cultural circumstances at the time of its Olympic nomination that CEO-UAB has suggested that it saw 50 years’ worth of development in six years of planning. No host city has since found itself at such a crossroads at the time of the Games. The Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games were one of a kind, and we may never see another legacy like it.