BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS : BARCELONA’S WEEKEND: ‘TO DIE OF SUCCESS’

The midpoint of the games will be remembered by the people of Barcelona as as one of the most frenetic weekends in the city’s history.

A fretful combination of hundreds of thousands of people on the move under searing heat, traffic patterns disrupted because of the marathon and major events that jammed streets and stadiums until the small hours put Barcelona to its severest test.

It passed--but there were trying moments when it took more than an hour to inch down from the Montjuic Stadium past broken escalators, or to ride a few stations as a sardine on superheated subways. Nearly a million people visited the Montjuic area over the weekend by estimate of the newspaper El Periodico.

Arguing that the marathon should have been scheduled at some other time in some other part of the city, the newspaper criticized planners for not foreseeing the sweaty Saturday night mess in an editorial entitled “To Die of Success.”

This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and Baltimore Sun, all Times-Mirror newspapers.