The COE is inclined to reject the Catalan candidacy for the Winter Games and bury the project for 2030

New script twist, probably the last for the Olympic adventure in the Pyrenees.

The Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) will reject the Catalan candidacy to host the 2030 Winter Olympics and plans to announce the end of the sports project next Tuesday.

The committee's position comes a day after the Generalitat de Catalunya announced its intention to recover the Pyrenees-Barcelona project, drawn up between 2010 and 2020, to aspire to the 2030 appointment due to the blockade of the Diputación General de Aragón (DGA) .

Sources from the negotiations admit that the candidacy is "burned", although they open the possibility of finding a way out for the 2034 Games.

The decision of the COE aims to close the last chapter in a history of political disagreements, especially between the Government of Aragon and the rest of the administrations involved (Generalitat, central government and committee).

The technical agreement reached by the representatives of all administrations at the end of March was invalidated by the intervention of the president of the DGA, Javier Lambán, who rejected the plan due to what he considered "lack of equality".

The Aragonese president considered that the technical plan did not fulfill the promise of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who in September 2021 said that the candidacy would be on "equal footing".

Those words became Lambán's mantra, which claims to share the alpine skiing events between the two territories and has rejected the different COE counterproposals.

The DGA, for its part, presented another offer two weeks ago to distribute the tests in batches, but it was not considered either.

The negotiations in recent weeks have worn down all relations to the point that Lambán called for the resignation of the president of the COE, Alejandro Blanco.

In the last meeting with the political representatives of all the administrations, Blanco already told his interlocutors that the future of the candidacy was black.

The bet of a joint candidacy between Catalonia and Aragon had a notable acceptance in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) since the central government invited the DGA to enter the project in 2020. The growing mistrust between the two regional administrations, however, derailed the project.

The blockade of Aragon and the rush to specify the Olympic plan to the IOC led the Generalitat to present an alternative on Thursday: recover the parent project of the Pyrenees-Barcelona to host the 2030 Games only in Catalonia.

The proposal has not had a response from the COE, according to sources from the Generalitat, and it is especially disliked in Moncloa due to the possible political cost that supporting a project endorsed only by an independentist government would entail.

In addition, the DGA has already announced that it would remove "sea and land" against a strictly Catalan candidacy because, it considers, "it is totally unacceptable", according to the Aragonese Presidency Minister, Mayte Pérez.

The risk that the territorial conflict between Catalonia and Aragon is further aggravated by the Games makes the Sánchez Executive uncomfortable, whose endorsement is essential to support an Olympic candidacy.

The IOC has always defended that the involvement of the central government is essential to trust in an Olympic project.

The problem is that relations between Sánchez and the Generalitat are not going through their best moment after the case of espionage to different independence leaders.

The spokeswoman for the Catalan Executive, Patrícia Plaja, went so far as to suggest that the current situation is not getting off the ground “because one of the parties involved is Catalonia”.

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