Barcelona's Olympic Vocation

In the opening ceremony of the 1992 Olympic Games, Barcelona's mayor Pasqual Maragall began his welcoming speech by retrieving an uncanny specter of the past. He referred to the city's attempt in 1936 to organize an alternative Games to the Nazi Olympics held in Berlin that same year. He also alluded to the president of Catalonia's autonomous government of the Gener-alitat de Catalunya, Lluís Companys, who would have inaugurated these Games if they had taken place. Maragall's exact words were “Senyors, ciutadants del món: fa cinquanta-sis anys s'havia de fer una Olimpíada Popular en aquest estadi de Montjuïc. El nom del president d'aquesta Olimpíada Popular és gravat allà dalt, a l'antiga Porta de la Marató. Es deia Lluís Companys i era el president de la Generalitat de Catalunya” ’Gentlemen, citizens of the world: fifty-six years ago, the Popular Olympics were supposed to open in this stadium of Montjuïc. The name of the president of these Popular Olympics is stamped up there, on the old Door of the Marathon. His name was Lluís Companys and he was the president of the Generalitat de Catalunya’ (Cerimònia inauguració, TV3).

The purpose of these Popular Olympics was to organize a competition for the people against the Olympics that intended to glorify Hitler and the Aryan race. A tradition of alternative Games had already started in 1921 in Prague, when a group of mostly European unions and worker's associations created the Red Games in order to counteract the too aristocratic and elitist official Games founded in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Courbertin. Following Prague, the Red Games were celebrated in Frankfurt in 1925, in Moscow in 1928, and in Vienna in 1931. But, as Xavier Pujadas and Carles Santacana explain, the Barcelona Popular Olympics of 1936 were not exactly a new edition of the Red Games. Instead, multiple sport and civic associations, with the support of the Republican government of president Companys, organized them with the specific goal of counteracting the Nazi Games (79).

Opposition movements against the Berlin Games had already emerged in the United States in 1933, when the Amateur Athletic Union decided to boycott them for not allowing the participation of Jewish athletes.