What should be the last cartridge has already burned out. The Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) and the Spanish, Catalan and Aragonese governments met this morning without success, without reaching an agreement, according to La Vanguardia. The president of the COE, Alejandro Blanco; the Minister of the Presidency of the Generalitat, Laura Vilagrà, the Aragonese Minister of Education, Culture and Sports, Felipe Faci, and the Secretary General of Culture, Víctor Francos. And the main demand of Aragon, that is, that some of the disciplines of alpine skiing planned on the Catalan slopes of La Molina-Masella be shared with the Aragonese Pyrenees, has been rejected by the Government. The COE will communicate next Monday, after Blanco’s trip to Macedonia, what the situation is and the decision that is made.
Positions are festering. The Government of Pere Aragonès refers to the pact signed at the end of March by the technical teams of each of the four delegations. An agreement that collects that the queen tests, those of alpine skiing – downhill, giant, super-giant and slalom – are attributed since then to Catalonia if the joint candidacy is presented and is chosen by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Blanco has repeated on multiple occasions these days that the distribution of these tests was proposed by the Aragonese delegation already at the first meeting on December 21, and that it was closed “after two minutes.” An extreme that from the Government of Aragon completely deny.
“We will not respond to the proposals or occurrences of Aragón”, the spokeswoman for the Government, Patrícia Plaja, had made clear during a press conference that took place in parallel to the four-way meeting.
Instead, the Government of Aragon wants competitions in its three valleys. Until now, it only has Candanchú -a private capital ski resort- for cross-country skiing and biathlon. For the Aragonese, having one of these disciplines and a balance with Catalonia is “indispensable”. “The Government of Aragon maintains its willingness to negotiate a candidacy for the 2030 Winter Olympics but always on equal terms”, assured the Aragonese Executive led by the socialist Javier Lambán.
However, in the Aragonese Government they have assumed that they have more than complicated hosting Olympic tests if Blanco maintains, as he expressed a few days ago, that in the event that an agreement is not reached for a joint candidacy, the COE will choose between those that could be presented by both autonomous communities separately. The history of bickering between the sports entity and Lambán until today’s failed meeting is extensive, with accusations by the Aragonese president of Catalonia’s “political commissioner” of Blanco. The president of the Spanish Olympic Committee has criticized the Executive of Aragon for “lying” and has sometimes valued the attitude of the Generalitat.
Be that as it may, Lambán presented his proposal on Thursday in the Aragonese Parliament and sent it to the COE on Monday. “The Government will be there [at the meeting] with the work done for weeks and we hope to come out of it with things clear”, Plaja stressed at a press conference today while the meeting between the COE, Catalonia, Aragon and the Central government.
Catalunta has rejected Lambán’s proposal for several reasons. In addition to referring to the pact at the end of March, in the Generalitat they consider that the idea of ??distributing alpine skiing tests by communities according to whether they are male or female is not appropriate. At this point, Aragón recalls, for example, that the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina d’Ampezzo are scheduled to be divided by gender into stations more than five hours away. Catalonia argues, however, that such a distribution would also imply a duplication of investments which, in its opinion, would fail to comply with the criterion of economic sustainability that had been proposed from the beginning for the preparation of the candidacy for two.
