Copyright (c) 1992 Ràdio Televisió Olímpica

The Summer Games of the XXV Olympiad were held in Barcelona, Spain from 25 July to 9 August 1992. The Barcelona Games were the last Olympics in which both the Summer and Winter Games were held in the same year, as the IOC, in 1986, decided to stage both Olympics separately in alternating even-numbered years, beginning with the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway.

Barcelona is the second-largest city in Spain and the capital of the autonomous community of Catalonia, and these 1992 Games were very significant because the city was the birthplace and the hometown of then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch.

The Barcelona Games were the first since the end of the Cold War. In the years that followed the 1988 Games in Seoul, the world witnessed important political changes. Apartheid was abolished in South Africa, which allowed the nation to participate in the Games once again for the first time in 32 years, and then, there was the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of West and East Germany, as well as North and South Yemen. Communism was wiped out in the Soviet Union, which eventually led to the USSR itself being split apart into 15 independent sovereign countries.

As a result of these global political changes, the 1992 Games were boycott-free for the first time since the Munich Olympics in 1972.

A total of 169 nations sent athletes to participate in the Barcelona Games. The Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia made their first apparition since the 1936 Berlin Games, while Lithuania sent its first Olympic delegation since Amsterdam 1928. The other ex-Soviet republics chose to take part as a "Unified Team", although the winners were honored under the flags of their own then-newly birthed republics.

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