In the midst of a monumental drought, with the use of water increasingly threatened and after years and years of lack of political agreement, which led to the breakdown of the joint candidacy of Aragon and Catalonia, the Generalitat already assumes that it is not worth It is worth thinking about a Winter Olympic Games for the Pyrenees. Although it is not yet official, everything indicates that in 2030 those Games that Catalonia aspired to will be held in the French Alps while in 2034 it would be the turn of Salt Lake City (United States) and in 2038 that of the Swiss Alps.
Taking into account the image that the Catalan mountains present in the middle of winter, with little snow, the project itself seemed like a chimera, with the dossier bogged down since July 2022. It was then that the Generalitat formalized a solo project that has not made any progress. since then.
According to Government sources, the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) did not give any response to this pre-candidacy. According to these sources, if in the future the COE were interested in formulating a new candidacy, this “should be re-analyzed due to issues such as drought,” among other aspects.
The COE, led by its president, Alejandro Blanco, worked hard to try to get all the parties to agree when the objective was to hold the Games in Catalonia and Aragon. However, when that flew through the air, among the distempered boxes of the Aragonese president at the time, Francisco Javier Lambán, the COE already realized that the candidacy had no signs of being viable and stopped rowing.
Since the Government sent its project alone, there has been no further communication with the COE and no new meetings with the mayors of the Pyrenees involved in the matter. The last summit took place a year and a half ago. Already in November 2022, another signal was transmitted that the candidacy was very much on hold when the Generalitat announced that it was freezing its technical office. The Government then relocated the former skier Mònica Bosch, coordinator of the candidacy in Catalonia, within the cabinet of the Department of the Presidency to “advise” the counselor, Laura Vilagrà, on “cross-cutting projects” such as the America’s Cup sailing.
Nor does the climate emergency that has left most of the Catalan courts fallow. This was witnessed by the Secretary of Climate Action of the Generalitat, Anna Bernades. “With the images we have seen in the ski resorts, it is difficult to hold a Winter Olympic Games in latitudes like Catalonia,” she stated on Catalunya Ràdio.
Bernades stressed that the decision whether to throw in the towel or not corresponds to the Department of the President, which has sports competitions, but that the reports from his department mean that the matter must be approached with “great caution.”
