Monday, July 18, 2022 - 08:55

Gibraltar’s Olympic dream must be revived

Team Gibraltar leave for the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham next week to fly the Gibraltar flag proudly among those of over seventy different nations.

This is the ultimate competition for many of our athletes given that, disgracefully, Gibraltar continues to be excluded from the Olympic movement.

BATTLE

Gibraltar’s battle for admission into the IOC comes across as a little-known story of unfairness and discrimination. At the heart of it is the traditional Spanish objection to the Rock representing itself as an independent country. This means that although Gibraltar’s application to join the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was on the agenda as far back as the San Francisco IOC in 1960, and repeated at subsequent meetings, Spanish pressure from within effectively blocked Gibraltar’s membership.