Everything seems to suggest - and, at least in Madrid, they are very sure of it - that the contest for the Winter Olympics bid is to come to a close, as within a few days the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) will rule out giving its support to a single candidacy from Catalonia under the name of Barcelona Pyrenees 2030. Although the problem has been caused only by the government of Aragon and its president Javier Lambán, the COE has not found a way to deactivate the Socialist baron, who has stuck to his guns with proposals as grotesque as dividing the alpine skiing events between Catalonia and Aragon, with the men's competitions in one place and the women's in the other. Lambán has ended up throwing a fit, taking the debate into political terrain, and it hasn’t turned out badly for him. The fact that municipal and regional elections will be held in a year's time, in which the president of Aragon is also seeking re-election, with the opposition People's Party rising in the polls, has been a collateral factor that has not been as small as it first seemed.
Is the political and institutional contest completely finished? We can be more than 95% sure that it is. A percentage so high that it leaves little margin to think that things might go in some other direction when even the governments of Aragon and Catalonia have no ability to undo the steps already taken and make concessions that are outside the dialectical spiral into which it has descended. And the COE may end up washing its hands of the 2030 Games. There will, however, be a commitment from the Olympic world to support in the next Games an exclusive Catalan candidacy under the name Barcelona Pyrenees, although this would be for 2034. But to think of such a distant scenario today is almost a utopia. The Catalan government has had no official communication on the subject, but it is also beginning to sense, through indirect messages coming to it, that the match is over.
In the end, the absence of political consensus in Catalonia on this issue will not be clarified by a consultation of the affected population of the Pyrenees, nor by the Generalitat's refusal to carry them out due to the social controversy they had generated, nor by the victory of those opposed to the Games, among whom were different left-wing political formations, several well-known personalities who have presented manifestos against the bid and some organizations in the Pyrenees. Madrid will decide, which is still a paradox of the real political force of Catalonia and a sign of the harsh reality of the current situation. The interests of Madrid (the COE) and the PSOE (Aragon) have simply walked right over the chaos of a Catalonia in conflict between those who were in favour of the Games bid - some with certain wavers, of course - and those who were against.
We will see what they offer us in the coming days, how this issue will be definitively brought to a close and the cost to each political party of having proceeded in a way that was at times unintelligible. But it can be predicted that the Catalan parties, will toss a few dinner plates at one another, divided along the lines of supporters and detractors, since the signs clearly point in that direction. Lambán, for his part, with astonishing staying power, will hop on the wagon of populist discourse asserting that he was the one who prevented Catalan imperialism from stealing the Games from Aragon. Who known whether this card will win the hand in the Aragonese elections that are less than twelve months away. And so it will end (or not).