Barcelona 1992: Evaluating the Olympic legacy

Roche (2000) described the Olympics Games as a "show" that is constantly on the road, traveling from city to city every four years. In 1992 the show stopped in Barcelona for sixteen days of sporting competition that left an indelible mark on the city, its residents, all those involved in organizing the Games, the spectators who experienced the event live, and the millions that watched it on television. The legacy of those days lives on in Barcelona in many tangible and intangible ways; it is still an "Olympic city" (Moragas et al. 2003, 279-88). The Barcelona Olympic Games were widely heralded as a success in the mass media, and the keys to that success have been researched and documented perhaps more than any other Games in Olympic history (see Moragas and Botella 1995, 2002). The organizational model adopted in Barcelona has affected IOC policy (Felli 2002, 65-76) and was highly influential in the staging of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games (Cashman and Hughes 1999) and other mega-sports events. This chapter analyzes the political leverage of the Barcelona Olympic Games by interested political actors in the bidding, organizing, and staging of the games, leading to a discussion of the legacies of the Games and enabling an evaluation of whether the explicit and implicit objectives have been achieved to date.