Spain ’92 : A Medal Year : An Olympic Passage for Renewed Nation

Along the Mediterranean, the Summer of ’92 is sibilantly writ: Sport and Spain, spectacle and symbol. A new Olympics sponsored by a country celebrating its new identity.

The Games opening next week in Barcelona will be more than a showplace of heart-racing heroics by the world’s 15,000 most talented athletes, or the most elaborate stadium ceremonies since the Romans.

Behind the schmaltz and the sportsmanship, the XXV Summer Olympiad will inevitably mirror a world that has turned, swept by a gigantic revolution unimagined when the last summer flame was extinguished in Seoul four years ago.

The Cold War is finished; so is the Soviet superpower that lost it. Watch the new parade. In Barcelona, flag-waving athletes will herald countries both newly free and newly made, tokens, perhaps, of a minimalist international future--or, maybe, renascent tribalism.

For host Spain, the games are only one savory mouthful in a heady national paella of yearlong celebration. The 40 million Spaniards are remembering one landmark year, 1492, with another, 1992: Two defining moments in one nation’s history.

Back then it was Columbus, national reconquest from Arab invaders after seven centuries, and the (retrospectively regretted) expulsion of the Jews. Spain gave its language, its culture and its religion to vast and fecund regions of the New World.

The 500th anniversary year, in turn, celebrates Spain’s arrival as a modern democracy firmly facing outward after centuries of isolation and introspection.

“We are taking our place in Europe; we are taking our place in the international community. We want to play a role politically, culturally and economically,” said Emilio Cassinello, commissioner general of Expo ‘92, a six-month world’s fair in Seville that will attract millions more than the Olympics.

Expo and the Games are the brightest strings in a nationwide red-and-yellow bow that also includes a melodic year of cultural events and an Ibero-American summit July 23-24 in Madrid that will draw nearly all the world’s Spanish and Portuguese-speaking heads of state, including, probably, Fidel Castro. Deliberations done, the presidents will journey to Barcelona for the July 25 opening of the Games.

Behind the glitter, Spain has used its landmark year as an excuse to get its house in order for the arrival of a frontier-free Europe and the new century behind it.

Billions have been invested to upgrade the national infrastructure: highways, trains, airports, telecommunications and urban renewal projects that might otherwise have waited years. A $4-billion bullet train links Madrid and Seville.

Of all the dramatic changes, the one that will most strike on-site and armchair Olympic visitors is the remaking of host Barcelona. In the name of sport has come one of the world’s most dramatic examples of civic overhaul.

A city that revels in art, history, politics and, now, sports, Barcelona eats well, plays hard and sleeps grudgingly. Its restaurants are stocked by fishermen who often set sail around dawn, about when the city’s best discos are opening.

In Spain, and in Barcelona, the fun has already started.

Now, let the Games begin.