The president of the COE, Alejandro Blanco, seems to be clearer, with each passing day, what he would vote if, as he himself announced last Tuesday, we had to vote between the solo applications for Aragon o Catalonia. The idea of a joint move away with gestures like this Wednesday, which for the visit of the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)Thomas Bach, in Madrid only invited Catalonia to be. The Aragonese Government was not there because “it has not been invited”, assured the official Pignatelli sources, while the Minister of the Presidency of the Generalitat, Laura Vilagrà, did have the opportunity to attend, and then pointed out that the Catalan solo project It would have “all the guarantees to be able to win” after passing the evaluation of the IOC members.
“Our option was to collaborate with another territory which was Aragón, and it had Nordic ski resorts that met the requirements. But if this agreement is not possible, our candidacy, as IOC advisers have seen and evaluated, has all the guarantees to be able to win”, he assured at the headquarters of the COE Vilagrà, who attended the signing of the agreement between the COE itself, the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration of the central government and the Olympic Refugee Foundation.
Last offer
The president of the COE asked his counterpart at the IOC for more time to specify what the project will be like, given the lack of agreement to specify a joint project for Aragon and Catalonia. And if there is not, let it be a vote in an extraordinary assembly that decides between the two proposals alone. The one to which Vilagrà alluded and the one that Aragón has not yet presented because he is still thinking about transfer “shortly” a new offer of joint candidacy. This was confirmed, also this Wednesday morning, by the Minister of the Presidency of the DGA, Mayte Pérez, who insisted on the need to attend on an equal footing between both communities and a balance of tests and venues that includes all the Aragonese valleys .
But in view of the preference that Blanco no longer hides, what happened in his day when he had to choose between Jaca and Granada for the Winter Games or Madrid and Seville for the summer Games is getting closer. And what the president of the COE prefers, increasingly clear.
What happened on Wednesday in the visit of the IOC is a sum and continues in the rudeness of Alejandro Blanco towards Aragon, who already endorsed a proposal with Catalonia that Aragon rejected, which has not taken into account the counteroffer he made later the DGA to rebalance it and that ended up presenting a last alternative that worsened the conditions of the first. But this time it is perhaps the most public and notorious setback against the Aragonese president, Javier Lambán, and the DGA, on a day in which the highest representative of the IOC, the body that is called to choose the venue for the 2030 Winter Games I was visiting Spain. An appointment in which a community that says it wants to integrate into a joint candidacy was excluded at the same time that it invited the other, Catalonia, which is seen with “guarantees of winning”. And it does not seem that she is referring to a hypothetical vote in the COE assembly between her and Aragón to choose Spain’s bet, but rather in the final election of the international organization to host the 2030 appointment.
Perhaps this new setback explains the words that Mayte Pérez dedicated to the president of the COE at the end of the meeting held by the Governing Council at the DGA. The Aragonese Minister of the Presidency accused Blanco of being a “political commissar” from Catalonia and asked him to take “a step back” in the negotiation to reach a joint candidacy.
The apparent favorite
Pérez pointed out that the president of the COE, after so many “contradictions” has become an “obstacle to agreement” and that the decision to vote between two candidacies alone is “a leap into the void”, an “Olympic skid” that causes “a territorial confrontation”. In his opinion, Blanco is “judge and party” and they demand that he withdraw from the negotiation because they can no longer “trust him”, since Catalonia is the proposal that he defends and “it seems that he needed a useful fool to guilty and we will not allow it”.
In addition, the minister described Blanco’s performance as a “grotesque soap opera” for his umpteenth change of opinion that has had a single common denominator, which is “the defense of Catalonia” and the adjudication of Aragon as a “mere comparsa”, to the one that submits an “unbearable blackmail”. That is why he asked for the “loyalty and honesty” with which Aragón has acted. In return, he remarked, the community “has not been played fair” and has been given “unequal treatment.”
“At the service of Sanchez”
The general secretary of the Popular Party in Aragon, Ana Alós, assured this Wednesday that the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) is “at the service” of President Pedro Sánchez in the face of his “imperative need” to “satisfy” his ERC partners. She thus recognized it after the COE president’s latest statements that he has proposed a vote between the projects of Aragon and Catalonia if there is no joint candidacy. For the general secretary of the PP, with these decisions, which “dynamite the Olympic dream of Aragon”, it is shown that Sánchez’s PSOE is a “shameful hostage of Catalan independence”. “Sánchez doesn’t care about agreeing with those who want to destroy Spain for the sole interest of staying in the chair,” he emphasized. In addition, he pointed out that the Prime Minister “is laughing at the Aragonese and is now prolonging the humiliation by refusing to receive Lambán to, at the very least, give explanations.”
For its part, Ciudadanos Aragón has called for the immediate resignation of Alejandro Blanco. The leader of the orange formation in the Aragonese community, Daniel Pérez, is clear that the president of the Spanish Olympic Committee has been completely delegitimized to continue in his position.
And Blanco’s response, concise and forceful: “Everything that can lie has been overcome“, he said to respond to the words of Mayte Pérez. “We are going to talk about refugees, which is the issue for which we focus here. The issue of Aragon… I think he has already overcome everything, everything that can be lied to, I mean,” she concluded.
The Government of Aragon did not like these accusations at all, nor those made by the Catalan minister. And in the penultimate reply (there will be more crosswords), executive sources pointed out that Vilagrà’s statements reveal what Aragón thinks, and that “everything has been a farce, a theater perfectly organized by Mr. Blanco who has tried to play with the dignity of the people of Aragon so that he could act as a troupe and keep the tests that Catalonia does not want or cannot organize to make a candidacy of part and not of the country”.
Support for Blanco from the IOC
The last to join the controversy was the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, who said that he has “unlimited confidence” in the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) to redirect the situation. “It’s in his hand. I have unlimited confidence in him. That’s why Alejandro is the one who is going to fix all these issues,” said Bach, asked about it, after visiting a sports center for refugees in the Madrid town of Getafe. “The COE has the great leadership of Alejandro Blanco, who has a very important role in the Olympic world”, he said.
