An extraordinary assembly of the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) will choose between the projects of Catalonia and Aragon for the 2030 Winter Games if finally the governments of both communities do not agree, although a joint project is the priority option for which the The body will continue to work, its president, Alejandro Blanco, said on Tuesday.
The ordinary annual assembly of the COE has unanimously approved to continue with the talks to form a Pyrenean candidacy that involves both Catalonia and Aragon. But it has also agreed to present a project to the IOC in any case and, in the event that there are two separate proposals, one from each community, let the COE assembly vote on which one goes ahead.
"This Committee already chose between Jaca and Granada a candidacy for the Winter Games and between Seville and Madrid for the summer Games. But a choice between two would be the second option. We are going for the first, which is that there is an agreement I still believe in that," Blanco said after the assembly.
Before knowing the decision of the COE, the Aragonese president, Javier Lambán, has warned that the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, is "falling" and Aragon is waiting for a movement from the COE and the Government of Spain to resume negotiations on the candidacy, on which it has denounced that after several months of work "there is not a single page" that describes what it consists of, while Aragón has produced "many more" with its proposals, including the last one that he shuffles, and that he will make available to the central government and the COE when required.
The proposal includes something "as fair" as dividing the tests into batches with two options in each of them, the fundamental one being the alpine, and Aragon's willingness for Catalonia to choose first "for the sake - he underlined - of demonstrating our willingness to agreement". "We gladly accept the part of the lot that Catalonia does not choose; it seems to me that more generosity from Aragon and more predisposition to dialogue is impossible," she asserted.
Throughout the negotiation, he added, Aragón has rejected the sharing of evidence with Catalonia, the COE has gone so far as to suggest that it would present a technical candidacy, later it was ruled out in order to resume talks with the governments and, in the meantime, "attempts have been made to bypass the Government of Aragon by talking to stations and town councils in the Pyrenees", a route that the COE seems to consider "closed".
This attempt has outraged Lambán, as he acknowledged in a previous participation in the TVE program 'Fuera de set', but "luckily" the COE has found some municipalities and stations that "want the Games" but that " respect above all the Government of Aragon".
Lambán has pointed out that after a year of work he does not know if the candidacy is "at a standstill, accelerating, going backwards or slowing down" and that Aragón has now overcome the "setbacks", because it has been intended to be a "comparsa" of Catalonia when they always told her that she could be the winner if she relied on the story of the reunion of Spain with Catalonia, of the "return to the constitutional fold" of the Catalan independence fighters.
