1992 Summer Olympics

• 1. Introduction

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  The 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona reached their first great moment with an archer who was trying to miss. At the opening ceremony, the Paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo took a flaming arrow, lit from the Olympic torch. He aimed it over the top of the cauldron. The burning tip ignited the gas rising from the cauldron. Then the arrow flew on and landed outside the stadium. That odd trajectory was carefully designed, so that a failed shot could never drop fire among the people inside.

  The Games ran from the 25th of July to the 9th of August 1992, in a world where old borders were being redrawn. Athletes arrived from places that had new names, new flags, or no flag at all. How did a city win the right to host, and what had it been through before? Which teams marched, and which stars and unknowns made these Games memorable? What did the spectacle cost, and what did it leave behind in the city streets?

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• 2. Choosing Barcelona

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  On the 17th of October 1986, in Lausanne, Switzerland, the 91st session of the International Olympic Committee gave Barcelona the 1992 Summer Games. Of the 89 members, 85 voted by secret ballot, and Barcelona collected 47 votes. Its rivals were Paris, Belgrade, Brisbane, Birmingham and Amsterdam, which had hosted in 1928. New Delhi had announced a bid but withdrew in March 1986. Barcelona was also the hometown of the committee's president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who abstained. Paris and Brisbane would eventually host the Summer Games of 2024 and 2032.

  Barcelona had chased the Olympics once before, and that attempt ended in a coup. It bid for the 1936 Summer Games, which went to Berlin. With Nazi Germany organising those Games, the Government of Catalonia and the newly elected Spanish Popular Front government urged a boycott. They planned an alternative event in Barcelona, called the People's Olympiad. The planned inauguration fell on the 19th of July. That very day, the Spanish Army launched a coup d'etat, and the Spanish Civil War began.

  The city got its Olympics after all, and they carried an unusual distinction. The same meeting in Lausanne had also awarded the 1992 Winter Games to Albertville, France, which opened five months before Barcelona. From 1994, the committee decided that Summer and Winter Games would alternate in even-numbered years. Barcelona and Albertville were therefore the last pair held in the same year.

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• 3. New Flags

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  Twelve of the fifteen new states that emerged from the former Soviet Union chose to march together as the Unified Team. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan all stood under that single banner. It was the first Summer Games since the end of the Cold War, and the first untouched by boycotts since 1972. The Unified Team won 45 golds and 112 medals in total, beating the United States, which took 37 golds and 108 medals.

  The Baltic states chose their own paths. Estonia and Latvia sent their own teams for the first time since 1936, and Lithuania did so for the first time since 1928. Germany, reunified in 1990, competed as a single team for the first time since 1964. South Africa returned after 32 years away. It had been banned from international sport because of apartheid, and it sent 93 athletes.

  The breakup of Yugoslavia produced three Olympic debuts: Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Namibia and a unified Yemen, formed from North and South Yemen, also debuted. In all, 9,356 athletes from 169 National Olympic Committees took part. The largest delegations came from the United States with 545, the Unified Team with 475, Germany with 463, and the host nation Spain with 422.

  Four committees sent no athletes at all: Afghanistan, Brunei, Liberia and Somalia. Afghanistan still joined the Parade of Nations, and its flag was apparently carried by a volunteer from the Barcelona Organising Committee. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, made up of present-day Serbia and Montenegro, was shut out by United Nations sanctions. Some of its athletes still competed as Independent Olympic Participants, under the Olympic flag, and 58 of them took part. Serbia would return in 2008, the same year Montenegro made its debut as a separate state.

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• 4. Stars and Prodigies

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  Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were the headline names of the American "Dream Team" in 1992. Until then, only European and South American professionals had been allowed to compete, while the Americans fielded college players. The admission of NBA players changed that, and the Dream Team won the gold medal. It was inducted as a unit into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010.

  Vitaly Scherbo of Belarus, competing for the Unified Team, won six gymnastics golds, four of them in a single day. He tied Eric Heiden's record for individual golds at one Games, a mark Michael Phelps would later equal in 2008. In the women's all-around, Tatiana Gutsu took the gold ahead of Shannon Miller. Russian swimmers for the Unified Team dominated the men's freestyle in the pool. Alexander Popov and Yevgeny Sadovyi each won two events, and Sadovyi added a relay gold.

  Youth was everywhere. Chinese diver Fu Mingxia won gold at 13, making her one of the youngest Olympic champions ever. Japan's Kyoko Iwasaki won the women's 200 metre breaststroke at 14 years and six days, the youngest swimming gold medalist in Olympic history. Hungary's Krisztina Egerszegi took three individual swimming golds. American tennis player Jennifer Capriati won the singles title at 16, after reaching two Grand Slam semifinals at 14.

  Experience told its own story. Evelyn Ashford won her fourth Olympic gold in the 4x100 metre relay, one of only four women to reach that total. On the home track, Fermin Cacho won the 1,500 metres, giving Spain its first Olympic gold in a running event. In the shot put, Mike Stulce of the United States beat the heavily favoured Werner Gunthor of Switzerland.

  The programme itself grew to 257 events in 25 sports. Baseball became an official Olympic sport after six earlier demonstrations, and badminton and women's judo joined the programme. Slalom canoeing returned after a 20-year absence. Roller hockey, Basque pelota and taekwondo were shown as demonstration sports.

  Badminton gave Indonesia its first Olympic gold, after a silver in 1988. Susi Susanti won the women's singles by beating Bang Soo-hyun in the final. Alan Budikusuma then won the men's singles. Both players later married, and they received the nickname golden couple, or Olympic couple.

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• 5. Moments That Lingered

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  In a 400 metre semifinal, Britain's Derek Redmond tore a hamstring and struggled on towards the line. His father came onto the track without credentials and helped him finish. The crowd gave them a standing ovation.

  Gail Devers entered the 100 metre hurdles as the favourite, having already won the 100 metres flat earlier in these Games. She led comfortably until the last hurdle, where her foot struck the barrier and threw her off balance. She stumbled and fell on her final step, yet still finished fifth, .001 out of fourth. Paraskevi Patoulidou of Greece took the gold, and she dropped to her knees on the track in disbelief.

  The women's 10,000 metres carried a larger meaning. White South African runner Elana Meyer and Ethiopia's Derartu Tulu, who is Black and won the race, ran a victory lap hand in hand. Algeria's Hassiba Boulmerka faced a harder road. Muslim groups in Algeria had criticised her for showing too much of her body while racing. She received death threats and moved to Europe to train, and she still won the 1,500 metres.

  Protest took stranger forms in volleyball. Several members of the American team that won gold in 1988 returned in 1992. In the preliminary round, they lost a controversial match to Japan. Referees had ordered a replay of two sets after an apparent American victory. In response, the players shaved their heads. Steve Timmons gave up his trademark red flattop. The team still reached the playoffs and won bronze.

  In solo synchronized swimming, a computerised scoring slip changed the result. A judge entered 8.7 instead of the intended 9.7 for one of Sylvie Fréchette's figures. That error dropped her to second, and Kristen Babb-Sprague took the gold. After an appeal, FINA upgraded Fréchette's silver to a gold, and both swimmers stood as champions.

  Judo brought Israel two firsts on consecutive days. Yael Arad won silver, becoming the first Israeli ever to win an Olympic medal. Her medal came on the 20th anniversary of the Munich massacre and the 500th anniversary of the Alhambra Decree. The next day, Oren Smadja won bronze in the same sport, Israel's first male medalist.

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• 6. Sound and Screen

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  Greek mezzo-soprano Agnes Baltsa sang "Romiossini" as the Olympic flag was paraded around the stadium. Later, Alfredo Kraus sang the Olympic Hymn in Catalan, Spanish and French while the flag was raised. Ryuichi Sakamoto composed and conducted some of the ceremony's music. Angelo Badalamenti wrote the opening fanfare, with orchestrations by Joseph Turrin.

  Freddie Mercury and Mike Moran had composed "Barcelona" five years before the Games. Mercury admired the lyric soprano Montserrat Caballé, and the two recorded the song as a duet. Mercury had died eight months earlier, so they could never perform it together at the ceremony. Instead, a recording played over a travelogue of the city, seconds before the official countdown.

  The other theme, "Amigos Para Siempre", meaning Friends for Life, was the official song. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black wrote it, and Sarah Brightman and José Carreras sang it at the closing ceremony. The official mascot was Cobi, a Catalan sheepdog drawn in cubist style by Javier Mariscal. Cobi appeared on merchandise and starred in an animated series, The Cobi Troupe.

  Behind the cameras, a new kind of organisation was at work. For the first time in Olympic history, each Games got a host broadcaster created expressly for it. The aim was an international signal that was objective and impartial. For Barcelona this was Ràdio Televisió Olímpica '92, known as RTO'92, with a workforce of 3,083 people and over 50 mobile units. It delivered live coverage of every Summer sport for the first time, apart from a few preliminary events, totalling some 2,800 hours. The International Broadcast Centre stood in the exhibition halls of Fira de Barcelona on Montjuïc.

  The technology was equally new. NHK and Panasonic developed a system that recorded the Games digitally for the first time. Viewers saw footage from an underwater camera dolly on a track at the bottom of the pool. There was a periscope camera that could shoot above and below the water, and a microcamera mounted on the high jump bar. An overhead dolly ran along the stadium canopy to give a zenithal shot from 35 metres up.

  High-definition television made its first comprehensive Olympic appearance here. A joint venture called Barcelona 1250 broadcast 225 hours and 45 minutes in analog HD-MAC. The picture had 1,250 lines and a 16:9 shape, with commentary in five languages. Nearly 700 viewing sites across Europe could receive it, including fifty HDTV receivers placed in pavilions at the Seville Universal Exposition.

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• 7. Shadows Over Barcelona

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  Between the 29th of June and the 14th of July 1992, Spanish police carried out the arrests later known as Operation Garzón. They detained 45 Catalan pro-independence activists, journalists and politicians, accused of belonging to the armed organisation Terra Lliure. That group had already announced its dissolution in 1991. Many arrests were made without real proof, and 25 of those held were kept in solitary confinement. They denounced torture and threats of violence against themselves and their families, along with constant anti-Catalan insults. Political activists argue that the state used security for the Games as a pretext to weaken the left-wing branch of the independence movement.

  The Basque nationalist group ETA was feared as well. Observers worried it would use the Olympics to win publicity before a worldwide audience. As the Games approached, ETA carried out attacks in Barcelona and across Catalonia, including the deadly 1991 Vic bombing. On the 10th of July 1992, the group offered a two-month truce over the Olympics in exchange for negotiations. The Spanish government rejected the offer. Even so, the Games went ahead without an attack.

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• 8. City and Cost

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  Poblenou became the site of the Olympic Village and Olympic Port, and the city was opened to the sea. The nomination for the Games set off an ambitious plan for urban change that had already been drawn up. New sports centres rose in the Olympic zones of Montjuïc, Diagonal and Vall d'Hebron, and hotels were refurbished or built. Ring roads reduced traffic, and El Prat airport was modernised, with two new terminals.

  International media praised the organisation, the volunteers, the sportsmanship and the Spanish public, and some called these among the best Olympics ever. The Games presented a renewed image of a democratic Spain and showed Barcelona and Catalonia to the world. The infrastructure spending ran to billions of dollars. It is considered to have improved life in the city and its appeal to investors and tourists. Barcelona became one of the most visited cities in Europe after Paris, London and Rome. All the venues are still active, and the legacy was taken as an example for later Games such as London 2012.

  The price was steep. The Oxford Olympics Study puts the direct cost at US$9.7 billion, in 2015 dollars, a cost overrun of 266%. That figure counts only sports-related costs, such as running the Games and building venues, the Olympic village and the broadcast and press centres. Roads, rail, airports and hotel upgrades are excluded. London 2012 cost US$15 billion with a 76% overrun, and Rio 2016 cost US$4.6 billion with a 51% overrun. Since 1960, the average Summer Games has cost US$5.2 billion, with an average overrun of 176%.

  The map of venues reached far beyond the city. Rowing took place at Banyoles Lake, baseball at Viladecans and Hospitalet de Llobregat, and canoe slalom at the Parc Olimpic del Segre. Camp Nou hosted the football final, and the Estadi Olimpic de Montjuïc hosted athletics and both ceremonies. Some events, including diving, were held within view of the construction of the Sagrada Família.

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