Government and Olympic Committee seek consensus with Aragon on Games

BarcelonaThe president of the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE), Alejandro Blanco, met this Wednesday in Barcelona with the Minister of the Presidency, Laura Vilagrà, to analyze the candidacy of the 2030 Winter Games, which is entering a key phase. The meeting, scheduled before the controversy of recent days between the Catalan and Aragonese governments for the leadership of the project, has served to try to bring positions closer and strengthen the will of all parties to come to fruition. It was, in a way, the prelude to the meeting scheduled for Friday between the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, and the President of Aragon, Javier Lambán.

“It has been a technical meeting fleeing political controversy,” presidential sources told ARA, adding that the minister has remained in the position defended in recent days. In this sense, Vilagrà reiterated to Blanco the desire for Catalonia to be the “straw” of the Olympic candidacy, making it clear that the Government does not intend to share 50% leadership with Aragon, as defended by the government Spanish, Aragonese and also the COE. “Most tests would be done in Catalonia. And we have no problem with them being made in Aragon, but we value the Catalan Pyrenees and the Barcelona brand “, explain the same sources, who recall that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) also welcomes the latter point. “Nothing has been broken and we have set out to continue talking,” they concluded from the presidency.

At the moment, in fact, the candidacy is in the hands of the technical commission, which expects to have completed its work in late March or early April, and where the central government, the COE, the government of Aragon are represented. and the Generalitat. This commission is responsible for deciding the venue for each sport and the technical details that the IOC will have to assess before deciding whether to donate the 2030 Games to the Pyrenees, a region that has never hosted a Winter Games. The commission is well advanced in the project, in which the agreement between the parties is almost complete, but the question of the name, in addition to the consultation, remains to be decided, aspects in which the positions of the Government and the COE also diverge.

Comuns and CUP oppose the project

After Blanco stated on Tuesday that “a yes or no consultation is not feasible”, President Aragonés stressed this Wednesday from the Parliament the binding nature of the consultation that the Government will organize in the spring in the counties of the Alt Pirineu and Aran “If the territory does not want it, there will be no Games,” he said. It has been his response to the criticism that has come to him during the control session from communes and the CUP. With the aim of holding the Winter Olympics in the Pyrenees, the Government does not have the support of its two main parliamentary partners. The leader of the purple party, Jéssica Albiach, has accused the executive of “blackmailing” the Pyrenees to make them choose between “Games or nothing”, while the cupbearer Dolors Sabater has condemned the desire to make a Games in “full climate change” and asked the president if he organized them to “please the state.”

The two groups have also criticized Aragonès for excluding several counties from the consultation, in reference to Berguedà, Solsonès and Ripollès, although neither of them is expected to be the scene of the Games. The territories that have been left out of the vote, in any case, also criticize the Generalitat and threaten their own consultations. And the Stop Olympic Games platform has called demonstrations in Berga and Ripoll this Sunday at 6 pm to demand that they be able to decide on the candidacy. With sufficiently advanced technical issues, then, the Government will still have a long way to go to reach consensus, both territorial and political.