On paper, Catalan is one of the official languages of the Mediterranean Games in Tarragona, just as it was at the Olympic Games of Barcelona in 1992. During the opening ceremony of the Tarragona games last Friday, Catalan was used on equal terms with Spanish, English, French and Arabic. But the reality in the daily routine of the sporting venues and competitions is rather different.
As El Nacional has confirmed, the reality on the ground is that Catalan has been sidelined. This is the case, for example, for women's handball matches, which are being held at the El Vendrell sports club pavilion. Here, the presentation of teams is consistently carried out in Spanish and English, without any presence of the Catalan language.
This choice of languages does not have anything to do with a Spanish team being present. The images obtained by this newspaper show the moments before a match last Sunday between teams from Portugal and Slovenia. In fact, Catalan has not been used in the women's handball matches in general.
As a rule, in most of the competitions, exclusive use of English has been made for the presentations of teams and participants. Catalan has been largely overlooked during Tarragona's Mediterranean Games.
Sources within the Games organization consulted by El Nacional say that “the language in each competition depends on the norms laid down by the technical delegate for each competition”. This technical representative is chosen by the international federation that controls each sport. One example is the sport of fencing, where the rules provided by the sport's federation says “that French should be used for all purposes”. However, the Games organisers say that “whenever possible, and when time allows, there is an attempt to use more than one language chosen from the list of all the official languages”.