CITIES WRESTLING TO LAY CLAIM TO THE 1992 OLYMPICS : Barcelona Says It Needs the Games for Vitality

The fervent hope of this city on the Mediterranean coast is that six years from this week, in August 1992, the Summer Games of the XXVth Olympiad will be in their last, glorious throes here.

“With all due respects to Los Angeles and the wonderful show it put on in 1984, and whatever Seoul has planned for 1988, the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona are going to be simply the best ever,” Mayor Pasqual Maragall said recently.

His confidence--backed by an estimated $150 million the city already has spent in planning and preparing for the Games--will be tested in October when the International Olympic Committee meets to choose the host cities for the 1992 Winter and Summer Games.

Among the leading contenders for the ’92 Summer Games are an equally confident Paris and a more subdued Amsterdam. Less serious contenders are Belgrade, Yugoslavia; Birmingham, England, and Brisbane, Australia.

“It is our turn,” said Maragall, noting that Paris and Amsterdam already have had Summer Games and that France also is bidding for the ’92 Winter Games. He added that this is the fourth time Barcelona has sought the Games, having lost out to Paris in 1924, the Spanish Civil War and Berlin in 1936 and Munich in 1972.

Even so, Barcelona’s past efforts have produced a variety of facilities, among them a substantial stadium for track and field events and a swimming and diving complex. Although the stadium must be rebuilt and the swim facility renovated, both are key elements in its present application.

“Of the 37 required competition facilities, 27 are already built; 5 are under construction and will be finished in the next few years and only 5 are still in the planning stages,” says the city’s application to the IOC. Also cited is a wide range of training facilities.

In a supplement to the application, the city says that its soccer stadiums, with 125,000- and 45,000-seat capacities, were used for the final matches of the 1982 World Cup and that its sleek new velodrome was the site of the World Cycling Championships in 1984.

Jose Miguel Abad, who at this stage is Barcelona’s equivalent of Peter Ueberroth, said that a number of world-renowned architects and urban designers are involved in the planning for the city’s Olympic committee.

“Unlike Los Angeles, where most of the facilities were designed for the moment, we are having them designed so they can become permanent resources for the community,” said Abad, who, before taking over the Olympic effort, was the city’s manager of urban planning. “The improvements we are planning, such as the Olympic Village and new roadways, are not only necessary for the Games but are vital to the future of the city.”

Said Maragall: “Bidding for the Olympics has put the improvements into a timetable.”

Maragall, who as an urban economist attended the Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University and received a graduate degree from the New York School for Social Research, describes himself as a Socialist and a sports fan--”like the majority of Barcelona residents”--and adds that the combination should work well for both the Olympics and the city of 4 million people.

“Our bid is actually a planning tool,” Maragall said. “If we don’t get the Games, and that will be a tragedy for the Olympic spirit as well as us, the improvements will nevertheless go forward. But no doubt they will go at a much slower pace and without the same support of the public.

“Paris and Amsterdam may want the 1992 Games, but Barcelona needs them, if only for the stimulation, the energy and enthusiasm it will lend us.”

Barcelona has been intensely lobbying the IOC--and just about anyone else who will listen--for the designation since 1981, when it became the first city to indicate its interest in the ’92 Games.

Pledging support has been Spain’s diverse body politic, including King Juan Carlos, the Spanish Parliament, the regional Catalonia assembly and Barcelona’s broad array of Socialists, monarchists, conservatives, anarchists and chamber of commerce groups.

Even the fiercely separatist Basques have tacitly agreed not to set off any bombs that might mar the city’s chances, according to Maragall, and ran a special edition of their nationalist newspaper praising Barcelona’s efforts to attract the Games.

“In Spain, sports transcends national politics,” said the mayor, who as a Socialist has been working closely with the conservative Barcelona business community in preparing the city’s bid.

As for Olympic politics, no doubt helping Barcelona’s bid by his presence is Juan Samaranch, a Spanish member of the IOC and its president.

Over the last year, the process has involved a steady stream of IOC members descending upon Barcelona. “They are quite alert and demanding,” said Alejandra de Habsburgo-Lorena, the city’s chief of protocol.

What they and other visitors to Barcelona have seen on billboards, walls, fences, T-shirts, sun visors, pencils and almost every piece of paper the city hands out is a stylized, colorful logo of the Olympic rings, beneath which is the slogan: “Barcelona ’92.”

It is probably with great restraint that the bright logo has not been plastered on the city’s rich collection of architecture, including museums honoring native artists Picasso and Miro, a rambling, well-preserved Gothic Quarter and Art Nouveau boulevards displaying the distinctive works of Antonio Gaudi.

Beyond the logos and the hype, an ambitious construction program is beginning to take form. Most prominent is the remodeling of the track stadium on top of Montjuic by Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti. The facade of the 1929 structure, originally built for the 1936 Games, has been saved, but the interior is being completely rebuilt to increase and improve seating, to handle the expected media coverage and generally to update the facility.

Work on the stadium this summer was moving at a modest clip, given the city’s weather, which is similar to that of Los Angeles. Watching a lone bulldozer scrape away to lower the stadium floor, Jordi Carbonell, an architect for the Barcelona Olympic Committee, said: “No doubt, when the IOC makes its decision, the work will accelerate or stop.”

Also moving modestly was work on a freeway along the waterfront downtown, vital to linking the proposed Olympic Village to the various decentralized competition and training facilities sprinkled between Mount Tibidabo and Montjuic, which cradle the sprawling city.

“The link is a must, as is updating the Barcelona airport to handle the visitors we expect the Games will attract,” Abad said. When told of delays because of reservation foul-ups and mechanical problems on Iberia Airlines, the principal service in and out of Barcelona, Abad shrugged and said: “They will have to improve, too.”

Construction also has begun on a new 15,000-seat, multipurpose arena for gymnastics, basketball and volleyball, designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. The Tokyo-based Isozaki, who won a worldwide contest in connection with the project, is the architect of the abstract, geometric-styled Museum of Contemporary Art scheduled to open in Los Angeles this winter.

Ricardo Bofill, a local architect who has earned international publicity, and notoriety, for his neoclassical designs of housing projects in and around Paris, has designed a University of Sports. Predictably, the building in which wrestling is to be held will have a formal neoclassical facade.

The designs are part of an ambitious overall plan for a sort of combined sports campus and park atop Montjuic. The complex is to serve as a focus for the Games, as did the Coliseum and Exposition Park in Los Angeles.

The estimated 15,000 competitors will be housed in an Olympic Village designed as a secured seaside resort. After the Games, the Village is to be converted into 3,500 apartments. A key element in the Olympic package, construction of the Village awaits the IOC’s decision.

Abad estimated that the bill for the new and renovated facilities will be about $1.2 billion. That is nearly 10 times what was spent in Los Angeles, but an estimated 1/10th of what was spent on the 1980 Games in Moscow.

“But our aim is not to conduct the Olympics as a business, as was done in Los Angeles, where it was appropriate, or to build monuments, as in Moscow,” Abad said. “Our main profit will be to modernize Barcelona. We are doing it for our image, the tourism, yes, and the income it will generate, but mostly we will do it for ourselves.”

Said Maragall: “Every 50 years or so, Barcelona needs a push, to put it back on the world map, where it belongs. In 1888 and 1929, it was international exhibitions that did it. We hope the same thing will occur by holding the 1992 Games.”

The mayor paused, then smiled. “And besides, this is a very sports-minded city, and the Olympics will be a joy to have. We are not building the stadiums and arenas for decoration. We are going to fill them. Come back in 1992 and see.”