SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 15 : MAPS CAN’T BE DRAWN FAST ENOUGH AT GAMES

Among their other attributes, the Barcelona Olympics is proving a splendid lesson in geography. Catalonian nationalists spent $5 million in advertising to persuade the world that the country in which the games were being contested is Catalonia.

That did not sit well with Spaniards more nationalist than regionalist, but there are more new names to learn than Catalonia. Go to the head of the class if you can name medal-winning nations that are competing at an Olympics for the first time.

One, Namibia, is in Africa. (And South Africa is back in the medals table after three decades in the international wilderness.) Two medal winners, Slovenia and Croatia, are newly independent pieces of what used to be Yugoslavia. There are also chunks of what was the Soviet Union--including Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia--plus others that were combined under the banner of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Confused? Olympic officials are only a half-step ahead of you. They managed to produce the new flag of Estonia when a woman cyclist won a gold--but they flew it upside down at the medal ceremony.

* 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.