Friday, March 29

The COE confirms that it will not present a candidacy for the 2030 Games and points to Lambán for the disagreement

The Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) has confirmed this Tuesday that it will finally not present any joint candidacy for the 2030 Winter Olympics due to “there being no agreement” between the governments of Aragon and Catalonia. “We are not in a position to present a candidacy,” said the president of the COE, Alejandro Blanco, at a press conference at the organization’s headquarters in Madrid.

The Executive Committee of the COE held a meeting this Tuesday in which the main item on the agenda was the decision not to opt for the ‘Pyrenees Games’ in 2030 due to the disagreement between the political representatives of the communities that had to present themselves. Specifically, Blanco has pointed to the Aragonese president, Javier Lambán, whom he has accused of not having respected the technical agreement that all the parties had reached, including the representatives of his community.

“Each one has to assume their responsibilities”, has indicated the head of the COE. “We have fought for there to be understanding, respect and dialogue, but if there are no such bases, we cannot continue and this is the decision that the assembly has approved,” he lamented. “We cannot convey that disunity before the IOC, everything has weighed down our project to the point of exhaustion. We cannot maintain what we have fought for because there is no agreement, the candidacy does not exist”, added Blanco.

The president of the organization has also been disappointed by a sports project that “was supposed to unite wills” but “has led to important internal political confrontations based on lies and assumptions.” When asked by journalists, Blanco did not want to specify what lies he was referring to, but he did say that the technical committee never intended to distribute the disciplines of alpine skiing, as the president of Aragon stated. “You have to ask Mr. Lambán that, I have enough to clarify my ideas,” said Blanco.

In addition, the head of the Committee opened the door for some of the communities that have negotiated in this candidacy or even others to present a solo candidacy for the next Winter Games, in 2034. In this sense, Blanco has called for taking advantage “the work already done”, since in their opinion the proposal they had designed had a chance of having won. But, in the opinion of the COE, it should be for the next edition, since there is no longer time to modify the proposal for 2030, which was “for unity”. A consideration that destroys the latest aspirations of the Catalan Government, which this Tuesday underlined that Catalonia felt prepared for a solo candidacy in 2030.



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