One Year to Barcelona : Wait Till <i> Manana</i> : Olympic Preparation Is Pushing the Deadline

Before discussing Barcelona’s readiness to stage the 1992 Olympic Games, know this: Construction of the city’s landmark Sagrada Familia cathedral began in 1882.

It’s still not finished.

In fact, no one expects it to be finished for another 90 years.

With that in mind, Barcelona’s preparations to play host to the 1992 Summer Games, scheduled to open one year from today, are right on track. Although the leading city of Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain, is a maze of construction sites and detours, scaffolding and bureaucracy, Olympic officials maintain that there are no major hurdles left to clear in the final countdown to the Games.

“The press will be able to find a workman with a hammer and a nail to photograph on the eve of the Games,” joked Barcelona Mayor Pasqual Maragall, who doubles as the president of COOB, the Barcelona Olympic Organizing Committee. “But the cement mixers will have long since finished.”

Perhaps. But only because the Olympic master plan--a $3.9-billion civic overhaul that includes more than 300 projects and rates as one of the most comprehensive renovations in European history--has been revised repeatedly in the past 12 months. Four of the seven new hotels originally planned were scrapped; several venues were changed; foreign experts were hired to oversee everything from catering to communications and completion of a new highway system was postponed until late May.

Olympic “test” events that began June 27 also exposed several flaws, from the shoddy track and power outages at Montjuic Stadium to downright apathy regarding the baseball and equestrian competitions.

As a result, Barcelona is expected to go down to the wire getting ready for the Olympics, a fact that troubles some members of the International Olympic Committee.

“That Latin mentality, that manana , has a point where it has to stop,” said Richard Pound of Canada, an IOC Executive Committee member. “On July 25 (next year), a man will come here with a Greek flag and an Olympic flame, and suddenly there’s no more manana . That’s when everything had better be in place.”

Yet, if Barcelona’s goal was to undertake massive urban renewal and move out from under the shadow of Madrid, its archrival in both politics and soccer--especially the latter--then Spain’s second-largest city already has succeeded.

“Ten years ago, Barcelona was fairly unheard of outside of Spain,” Maragall said. “Now, however, almost everybody can put it on the map. In this way, we can say that we have already gained from the Games, because they have helped the city become known internationally.

“There is no doubt that on an international scale, the Games are the best investment a city can make.”

And what an investment. Stadiums and arenas aside, the crown jewel of the Olympic building program is the $1.7-billion athletes’ village complex on the waterfront, where an entire town--Poblenou--is under construction. When finished, it will include four kilometers of beach, a new harbor, 2,000 housing units, two 44-story towers, shopping malls and parks, and will finally give Barcelona a window to the sea.

Nevertheless, COOB faces controversy over the next 12 months on several fronts:

--Ticket sales. Only 361,786 of a possible 4.7-million tickets were sold in Spain in the first phase of marketing that ended June 18, and combined worldwide sales topped out at 1.5 million. All told, 65% of the tickets remain unsold.

“That’s typical of Spain,” said Josep Lluis Vilaseca, COOBs director general of sports. “We do everything at the last minute, and that includes buying tickets.”

--Prices. Hotels have borne the brunt of the criticism--and justifiably so with rates of $450 a night at five-star establishments, $400 at three-star and $225 at one-star--but the rest of Barcelona isn’t exactly cheap. Dinner for two in a good restaurant can easily run $100; most nightclubs charge a cover of $25 and up, and phone calls to the United States and Canada are $12 for the first three minutes.

“We aren’t saying the prices are not high, because they are,” said Josep Miguel Abad, COOB’s chief executive officer. “But if COOB ’92 had not signed an agreement with the hoteliers two years ago, the prices would be even higher.”

--Limited space. Because all but 5,600 of Barcelona’s 28,000 hotel beds already are promised to Olympic officials, sponsors and members of the media, most tourists will be lucky to find rooms in neighboring cities such as Tarragona and Girona. COOB officials will only guarantee rooms within one hour’s drive of Barcelona.

--Traffic. Although COOB has promised free transport on all buses, trains and subways to accredited personnel during the Games, Barcelona’s already wretched traffic problems figure to get worse. The real concern is the waterfront area, where 11 cruise ships will be docked, daily unloading thousands of people into the Gothic quarter.

“Let’s face it,” Pound said. “The people who stay on cruise ships aren’t the sort to use public transport. One and a half hours before the opening ceremonies, they’re going to come off the boats and look for their (rental) cars, and that’s where the problems will start.”

--Language. Catalan, one of the four official 1992 Olympic languages (along with French, Spanish and English), is the very essence of Catalonia’s independence movement. But it’s far from universal. As a result, COOB’s interoffice memos are snarled, staff meetings break down and the pace of progress inevitably slows.

A series of “One Year to the Games” news conferences were conducted recently in Catalan, leaving reporters from Japan, the United States and even Spain--all of whom spoke Spanish--in the dark.

--Heat. Of course, COOB has about as much chance of controlling the temperature as the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee did of controlling the smog in 1984. But Barcelona’s summers can be quite hot, with humidity frequently at 60% or higher. Not for nothing will many track and field events be held at night.

Most of the city’s 43 Olympic venues are already in operation, from the 60,000-seat Montjuic Stadium, where the opening and closing ceremonies and the track and field competition will be held, to the 4,000-seat baseball stadium in Viladecans. Venerable facilities such as FC Barcelona’s 120,000-seat Camp Nou Stadium and the cycling velodrome in Horta are being kept in top condition.

Only the roller hockey rink in Reus (due for completion this fall), the shooting range in Mollet (to be finished by February), the badminton stadium in Sabadell (March) and the Colom Fronton (May) for jai alai remain unfinished.

But there are problems. Stiff winds and power outages at Montjuic Stadium--coupled with a track that was ravaged by the Barcelona Dragons of the World League of American Football--played havoc with the European B Cup track and field competition in late June. The conditions prompted complaints from athletes, including javelin world record-holder Seppo Raty of Finland, who said: “It’s unthinkable that this is the track they’ll use next year in the Olympic Games.”

The Dragons also figure to come in conflict with COOB next May, when 10,000 seats will be added to Montjuic Stadium for the Olympics. Although the Dragons’ lease requires them to vacate the premises by May 1, WLAF officials are seeking an extension to play at least one more home game in Barcelona. If granted, stadium expansion could be pushed back perilously close to the Games.

The baseball, equestrian and water polo test events were largely ignored by the Catalan public, and it’s slowly dawning on others that such sites as the white-water canoe track in La Seu d’Urgell and the rowing venue in Banyoles are practically in France.

Then there’s the so-called “ring road” project, a 142-kilometer network of highways designed to ease the flow of traffic in and around Barcelona. Although some portions of the $950-million project are complete, others are not supposed to open until next June--if they open at all.

But COOB officials won’t panic.

“If we finish everything on time, we will be over the moon,” Abad said. “But if they are finished 30 days before the Olympics or one day, what is the difference? The public only knows that they are finished.

“We recognize that there are deficiencies and faults, but we are not prepared to say that things are unsatisfactory. We have been accumulating valuable experience.”