Exercising Democratic Citizenship: Sport in the Run-Up to the Olympics

Abstract

The discursive changes in the argument on citizen conceptualization, participation, and power decentralization that we have been pursuing so far in government documents, in the words of local leaders, and in municipal publicity campaigns, these work nowhere more smoothly than in matters of sport. Public space, popular participation, and an anthropological, humanist understanding of culture come artfully together in the realm of sport to realize a discursively seamless ideological shift. It is through the invocation of sport as a component of personal well-being, as a citizen’s right to be provided for by the welfare state; it is under the argument that the government is fulfilling its promises of providing more and improved facilities for the universal practice of sport in the city; it is through demonstrations of public participation and the occupation of public space that the large-scale practice of sport provide; it is connecting the celebration of the Olympic Games to a tradition of organizing popular Olympiads as part of the festive–political occupation of public space since the late-Francoist period, it is mobilizing all these narratives that the municipality would be able to make sense, for locals and the IOC alike, of its vision of Barcelona as a natural-born Olympic city. Still, sport has received little attention so far in discussions of how consensus was reached in 1980s Barcelona, regardless of how obvious its centrality to the Olympic Games, the event nobody fails to signal as the apotheosis of consensus. This chapter explores the importance of sport in understanding the evolution and smooth transition from the combative urban grassroots political agenda of the right of the city, to the peaceful unanimous celebration of the Olympic spectacle.