Barcelona Looks Back on Warm, Fuzzy Olympics

Sunday morning, for the first time during the Olympics, the rain in Spain stayed mainly over Barcelona. And when it had ended, when the booming thunderclaps had stopped and the torrents of water had slowed to a trickle, it was strangely quiet. Barcelona, the city that never sleeps, was doing just that.

Surely, the quiet was the result of a hangover of emotion. Saturday night, Barcelona simply drank in too much success.

First, a Spanish runner named Fermin Cacho won the 1,500 meters, one of the premier track and field events. Cacho, hardly a household name even in Catalonia, sprinted into the lead on the last straightaway and then kept looking around, waiting for somebody to take a run at him. When nobody did, he threw up his arms in both celebration and surprise. For Cacho and Spain, it had truly been a miracle mile.

Then, about five miles down the hill from where Cacho had dazzled and stunned 65,000 in Estadi Olimpic, Spain’s soccer team scored a goal in the last minute to beat Poland for the gold medal, 3-2. A crowd of 95,000 watched at Nou Camp Stadium.

As the word swept the city, drivers honked their horns, people embraced at sidewalk cafes and mothers lifted sleeping children from their beds and carried them to the spontaneous celebrations. At Plaza de Espana and Plaza de Cataluna, the crowds runneth over. At the city’s fanciest restaurants, waiters in tuxedos popped bottles of champagne and poured for all. Nobody had asked. Nobody had to.

In so many ways, Saturday night was a fitting end to the Barcelona Olympics. Late Sunday night, the closing ceremony was held, an event as much for the Olympics as for the city it is held in. Saturday night was for Barcelona, and if ever a city had deserved a grand party, this was it.

Los Angeles was the bottom-line Olympics, efficient and calculated, also comfortable and friendly in an all-American sort of way. The Olympic Games needed to make a profit so future cities would bid on them without terror. And Los Angeles came through beautifully, as did U.S. athletes, who rushed to gold time after time, not caring that Olympic historians placed a giant asterisk after the year 1984 that said: Soviet Team Missing.

Seoul was the foreign Olympics. Europe is different. Korea is foreign. But huge language and cultural barriers eventually came at least part way down, leaving the Games of 1988 as a Korean curtain-raiser, a debutante’s ball of sorts that told the world trade markets that suitors were welcome. Its overall image marred only by the Ben Johnson drug scandal, the Korean Olympics proudly showed the world that South Korea, too, can throw one grand world sports party.

Barcelona was the warm, fuzzy Olympics. They were a kinder, gentler Games, without any politician mandating that. They were a walk on a warm night by a warm sea, leaving warm memories when they ended. They lacked the cool efficiency of Los Angeles, but they got it done nicely. They lacked the hyperactive paranoia of Korea over whether the rest of the world was pleased.

The Barcelona Olympics were comfortably secure with themselves, a perfect marriage of Spanish culture and historic architecture that set the stage and merely let the Games begin.

Said Harvey Schiller, president of the United States Olympic Committee: “Barcelona is the most hospitable city of any in the world that I have seen in regard to hosting an Olympic Games. The most amazing thing is that the Olympics and the city of Barcelona were able to operate side by side in a most harmonious way.”

The sights, sounds and stories of the Barcelona Olympics are memorable, even riveting.

* There is the teen-ager, sitting in the players’ restricted area next to the tennis stadium. Everything about her says that she is a little girl who wandered into the wrong place. She is sucking on a lollipop. A few days later, Jennifer Capriati plays some of the greatest women’s clay court tennis ever and, at 16, is an Olympic gold medalist.

* Italy is playing the United States in men’s volleyball, and the surprising Americans are in the process of upsetting the defending world champions. In the crowd is Prince Albert of Monaco, and he is jumping all around the VIP section, rooting and cheering and acting, well, like an American sports nut. Clearly, you can be royalty, but when the good old U.S.A. needs some vocal support, all that stuffy dignity goes right out the window--when you are the son of Grace Kelly.

* She almost had to have her feet amputated because of a rare disease, but now, Gail Devers is skimming over the hurdles like a perfect physical specimen. She is so much better than the rest, it is shocking. If it were a horse race, rather than the women’s Olympic final of the 100-meter hurdles, they would report that she won by daylight. And then her lead foot hits the last hurdle and she is knocked off balance, sending her into a desperate sprawl/crawl/scratch for the finish line. She crawls to fifth place, and a woman from Greece takes the gold medal. No other Greek female track athlete had ever made an Olympic final before, and when she is asked if she had seen her husband to celebrate, she said that she hadn’t, that he probably was hiding somewhere in the stadium and crying.

* It was called a Congress. The dinner to celebrate its end was called a Gala Dinner. The dress of the day was a dark suit. The dress of the night was a darker suit. If nothing else, the International Volleyball Federation, largest sports federation in the world with 201 countries, has a clearly established dress code for its yearly and pre-Olympic sessions. Then, one day, into this sea of coats and ties and middle-aged men strode a couple of California beach dudes, Randy Stoklos and Sinjin Smith, formerly the best beach volleyball team in the world and the best possible spokesmen for the future of the sport as an Olympic possible. “They were wonderful,” reported Ruben Acosta, president of the FIBV. “They marched right down the middle aisle, made a great speech. And they both wore ties.”

* It was crisis time at NBC. The network that brought the Games to the United States was about to interview Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympics Committee, but the interviewer, Katie Couric, wanted to ask Samaranch some tough questions. There was lots of debating and yelling and eventually, Couric was pulled off the interview and replaced by Dick Enberg. One NBC executive was heard to say that Couric had “a journalistic chip on her shoulder.”

Well past the time when people who came here remember the Games of the Barcelona Olympics, they will remember the setting.

Somewhere, there must have been a god of Olympic architecture who saw the famous National Palace, halfway up the hill to the aging and charming Montjuic Stadium, surrounded by other museums and buildings of wonderful charm and accessed by two ten-story pillars and a half-mile long entryway. And he said: “Ah, perfect.”

And so it was.

In Calgary for the 1984 Winter Games, they had a town square setting where they blocked off streets and recreated medal ceremonies at night for people who didn’t get to see them during the day. It was a warm setting in a winter place.

Now, organizers of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta are talking about possibly blocking off some streets to capture this same sort of atmosphere.

And it is all because of Barcelona, where being around the Games was almost as good as going to the Games. On any given night here, there would be at least 100,000 people, most of whom had no tickets and didn’t care, walking the long entryway street called Avenida Reina that leads to the National Palace. Mostly, they were there just to be there. The sky was lit with spotlights, there were huge fountains everywhere, and music boomed out on speakers stacked high like at a Springsteen concert.

It was the Olympics where hanging out became a demonstration sport. Every night, they strolled, lolled, took pictures of each other at the fountains or just put their feet in them and cooled off. Every night was a grand celebration, and the only thing formal going on was well up the hill, at the stadiums of track and field, swimming and gymnastics.

Saturday night, of course, was different. There was something to celebrate. There was Fermin Cacho and an Olympic gold medal soccer team. And so they took to the streets, arm in arm, just to stroll and enjoy and sweat in the ever-present humidity. Or they found an outside cafe and sipped cerveza .

And by Sunday night, they had recovered and returned to the hills around the palace and to the Avenida Reina. More were there than any other night, perhaps as many as 250,000. They cheered as the Korean marathoner ran past them through the pillars and outdueled the Japanese runner up the hill and into the stadium for the gold medal. Then they strolled and sipped more cerveza and waited for the fireworks that would blast forth from their stadium on the hill, a stadium that most of them had never entered during these Olympic days.

Eventually, all the festivities would be over and by 2 a.m., the crowd would be down to, say, 100,000. It would be another night that Barcelona, the city that never sleeps, wouldn’t.