Official Report Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games
“One of the commitments undertaken by the Organising Committee of the Olympic Games is to take charge of the publication of the Official Report. The Report has one essential purpose: to pass on to the managers of the Olympic Movement and future Organising Committees the experience acquired. As an additional benefit, it provides the Olympic Family as a whole with the results of the sports competitions. Furthermore, because they involve the whole world, the Olympic Games are the most complex and demanding event on the calendar.
They are itinerant by nature, which means that the organising city is unlikely to have any previous experience. And so the Official Report which each Organising Committee leaves to its successors must be a reflection not only of the sporting event, which has already been thoroughly discussed and analysed by the media on the five continents, but also of each and every aspect of the organisation which made it possible and which only the Report can explain in the necessary depth and detail. It must therefore be an exhaustive, serious document from which future organisers can extract the maximum amount of information.
But the Official Report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad is the first one in history to be available to the public. This unusual element poses a new challenge to the people in charge of producing it: to make the explanation of the organisation of the Games interesting and enjoyable to a wide audience without sacrificing the seriousness and thoroughness demanded by the content.
[…]
And so, as Josep Miquel Abad says in his introduction, the first volume will be “the climax of a process which has taken years”, and the fruit of the labours of the whole city and the entire country. Moreover, the book explains the transformation of Barcelona since holding the Games there became more than just an idea.”
Fragment taken from the editorial note to the first volume, written by Roma Cuyàs i Sol, Director of the Official Report.
Official report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad : Barcelona 1992. V.1. The Challenge : from the idea to the nomination
COOB’92 (1992): Official report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad : Barcelona 1992. V.1. The Challenge : from the idea to the nomination. Barcelona : COOB’92.
Download the e-report. (PDF, 97 MB)
“The drafting of this first volume has involved a tremendous labour of documentation. The information has been taken, as far as possible, from the most reliable sources, the basis being the documents published by the Olympic Office and the branches of the administration which formed the consortium of the Managing Council during the period of the Candidature. The IOC archives have also been consulted, as well as those of the companies which make up HOLSA (AOMSA, VOSA and IMPU) and those so kindly placed at our disposal by the institutions of the COOB’92 consortium through the relevant organisations. Some private archives were also referred to when the need arose. Altogether
the compilers have read over thirty thousand pages and looked at over ten thousand photographs. In the selection of the photographic material prominence has been given to the documentary and informative aspects. Moreover, the Report has benefited from the contribution of specialists from a wide range of disciplines -who have brought to our work an authority which it would not otherwise have had- and, as the drafting progressed, from the suggestions of all those closely involved with the Candidature.”
Fragment taken from the editorial note to the volume, written by Roma Cuyàs i Sol, Director of the Official Report.
Official report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad : Barcelona 1992. V.2. The Means : objectives, resources and venues
COOB’92 (1992): Official report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad : Barcelona 1992. V.2. The Means : objectives, resources and venues. Barcelona : COOB’92.
Download the e-report. (PDF, 92 MB)
“The volume you are reading is an account of one of the most arduous parts of the task of organising the Games: the precise definition of the objectives that had to be accomplished at any given moment and the procurement of the means and resources required to do so. That is the subject of the first four chapters, which cover the internal history of the Barcelona’92 Olympic Organising Committee and describe the way in which the economic resources and the staff who would be capable of meeting the challenge which lay ahead were found.
The fifth chapter deals with all the changes which were made to the four Olympic areas of Barcelona and the subsites to provide the forty-three venues for the competitions in the twenty-eight sports. Both Barcelona and the subsites gained more from this exercise than just a few temporary facilities for top level competitions, as the works were planned with the idea of recovering or creating permanent facilities.
Lastly, chapter six is a summary of the cultural programme which was put on over the four years of the Barcelona Olympiad leading up to the Olympic Festival of the Arts, which was held parallel to the Games.”
Fragment taken from the editorial note to the volume, written by Roma Cuyàs i Sol, Director of the Official Report.
Official report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad : Barcelona 1992. V.3. The Organisation : the preparation of the Games
COOB’92 (1992): Official report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad : Barcelona 1992. V.3. The Organisation : the preparation of the Games. Barcelona : COOB’92.
Download the e-report. (PDF, 82 MB)
“The Olympic Games are one of the most complex and demanding events today. To guarantee success a high level of planning is indispensable, but so is a capacity for improvisation to deal with the incidents which inevitably crop up in a project which simply cannot be rehearsed beforehand. The Barcelona Games, which bore little resemblance to earlier Olympics, called for an effort of preparation and organisation which was without precedent in this country in terms of length or intensity.
The eleven chapters of this volume, which is entitled The organisation, describe the process of preparing and operating all the projects which COOB’92 mounted to produce the results described in Volume IV, Sixteen days in summer. First of all, it talks about the sports organisation itself: the competitions and the route of the torch and the ceremonies.
The next four chapters deal with the “material” aspects of planning: adaptation of the venues, logistics, technology and accommodation. Next comes a description of the work done in the field of the services which the Organising Committee had to provide for the Olympic Family, and a fundamental matter: security. Last are the two aspects in which the Barcelona’92 organisation stood out most notably from earlier Olympics: image and commercial management.”
Fragment taken from the editorial note to the volume, written by Roma Cuyàs i Sol, Director of the Official Report.
Official report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad : Barcelona 1992. V.4. The Games : sixteen days in summer
COOB’92 (1992): Official report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad : Barcelona 1992. V.4. The Games : sixteen days in summer. Barcelona : COOB’92.
Download the e-report. (PDF, 106 MB)
“This fourth volume of the Official Report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad Barcelona 1992 covers all the events which took place between 25 July and 9 August 1992, the result of the years of effort and work preparing and organising, which have been chronicled in the previous volumes.
No account of what happened over those two weeks would be complete unless it started from the beginning of the final countdown at the lighting of the flame in Greece, its journey to Catalonia and its itinerary around Spain. As it passed, the torch was greeted by an outburst of unanimous popular enthusiasm for the Games. But most of the information contained in these pages inevitably refers to the sporting part of this great event: one by one, the competitions in the twenty-five sports on the official programme and the three demonstration sports are described and there are a number of tables to supply the reader with all the facts and figures about participation, final results and other important aspects.
Not only did the city dress up in its finery to do honour to the thousands of visitors who flocked to Barcelona (and the fifteen subsites); it dispensed hospitality and festive spirit to make the sporting occasion a model of conviviality and friendship. The spontaneous demonstrations of that open, plural and generous character were in perfect harmony with the broad range of cultural events which enriched the valuable heritage of Barcelona and Catalonia with history and art exhibitions, theatre, music and dance, organised by the Cultural Olympiad.
Moreover, the organisation provided many services around the competitions for the Olympic Family, from accommodation or transport for the competitors, officials, judges, journalists, VIPs and guests to
catering or the infrastructures required by the press and broadcasters so that they could report on the event in the best possible conditions, via security, accreditations, medical services and many others.
The book which you have before you is a faithful, objective and —why not?— impassioned chronicle of the whole range of elements which helped to make those sixteen summer days in 1992 an enduring part of the collective memory of a city and a country.”
Fragment taken from the editorial note to the volume, written by Roma Cuyàs i Sol, Director of the Official Report.
Official report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad : Barcelona 1992. V.5. Els resultats = Les résultats = Los resultados = The results
COOB’92 (1992): Official report of the Games of the XXV Olympiad : Barcelona 1992. V.5. Els resultats = Les résultats = Los resultados = The results. Barcelona : COOB’92.
Download the e-report. (PDF, 38 MB)
“The volume you have in your hands is a compendium of the results of all the events on the competition programme of the Barcelona Olympic Games (25 official and 3 demonstration sports) in all their phases.
The information in the tables has been taken from the AMIC (Multiple Access to Information and Communication), the Olympic Family information system which was in operation for the sixteen days of the Games.
The sports appear in the alphabetical order of the initials which stand for them, the ones most commonly used in the Olympic Movement. The abbreviations in the results tables (most of them in English) have been glossed in the four official languages of the Games (Catalan, Spanish, French and English) on the head page for each sport.
By way of complementary information, the following pages list all the National Olympic Committees (NOC) which competed in Barcelona (ordered by their official initials), the world and Olympic records and the gold, silver and bronze medals won by each NOC and in each sport.”
Fragment taken from the editorial note to the volume, written by Roma Cuyàs i Sol, Director of the Official Report.
