Your Royal Highness,
Your Excellencies,
President or the Prince of Asturias Foundation,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great honour for me to accept the invitation of Don Pedro Masaveu, President of the Prince of Asturias Foundation to speak to you.

When a competition reaches a level where it extends to different continents and embraces a host of nations, its creators may rightly feel proud of their role, satisfied with their work and happy with what they have achieved.

If in addition we consider the standing, rank and prestige of those who take part, then the pleasure the creators feel is greatly enhanced. This is what has happened with the Prince of Asturias Prizes. Linked with and united to a royal title and to the roots in Spanish culture of this wonderful land of Asturias, they have taken their place among the most prestigious in the world.

Given my sports background with half a century's experience of its joys and its uncertainties at world level, I am inclined to compare those competitions of strength, skill and speed with the truly more complex and important ones in the fields of science, culture, friendship and Ibero-American understanding, which we find so excellently typified in the person of the Prince of Asturias, who with His high rank and sporting spirit provides such a fine example for the generation of Spaniards who will bring the century to a close.

I must thank my prize jury colleagues who have accorded me the added distinction of speaking to you in the name of them all. I wish to mention especially President Eanes who controlled the award adjudication debates in which I had the honour to take part.

The scientific, cultural and human values, recognised and awarded in this Foundation, motivated all of us who participated in the granting of the awards, and I shall always remember with gratitude the part I was honoured to play in the 1986 adjudication, which continued along the same prestigious path embarked on in 1981 when the Foundation Principado de Asturias first set its fine example.

People of prestige, intellectuals, scientists, figures from the political world and the world of research, Nobel prize winners in the most complex disciplines have passed before our eyes and been considered by the different Juries of this Foundation, figures worthy of the high patronage which His Royal Highness the Prince of Asturias has bestowed on the awards we make today.

I would not like to be dubbed an innovator, or a mould breaker, still less to impose on an assembly of scientists and men of letters a new and overwhelming matter such as the Olympic Movement and sport, but the importance of sport goes on increasing at a surprising rate and, as an example of this, I wish to express my joy and satisfaction at the creation of the Prince of Asturias Award for Sport for which I predict a magnificent future.

It is fitting to explain that sport and, pre-eminently, the Olympic Movement, is not simply a few records, a collection of medals nor the names of a few winners. The champion is fine, the super-recordholder a good example. But much more important is the athlete of limited ability with modest records and the little known and self-effacing trainer who comes to the club every day to give sports practise to the young. All of them, champions, athletes, trainers and sports devotees have made the educational system practised a century and a half ago by Thomas Arnold in the British Public School the most important social fact of 20th century. Bit by bit has penetrated the 164 countries that form the great Olympic family. Sport and the Olympic Movement have erected stadiums, which are like the great cathedrals of the modern world. The sports centres, embellished with modern architecture, vie with other in beauty, functional utility and popular appeal which have amazed the generations of the second half of this century.

The popular attention which Olympic sport has awakened has reached levels that no other human activity has achieved. 2,500 million people saw the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. More than half the population of the planet was present at that Olympic Event, the ceremony where no sports competition took place. It was a clear demonstration that the Olympic Movement, its philosophy of friendship, peace and understanding between all races, outlooks, religions and peoples of the Earth, was understood on the five continents as the most ecumenical and warmest message the modern world can offer.

I am pleased to explain before His Royal Highness an aspect of the Olympic Movement which is of the greatest interest.

Our four-yearly games and the ethic which inspires them is alive and works continually through the four years of each Olympiad, collaborating with science, the Arts, technology and all the advances of the modern world.

Each Olympic Games is one lap more in the race to achieve a better world for all. So, in 1964 the Tokyo Olympics marked an artistic and technological advance unrivalled by any other non-governmental organisation. In Mexico and Munich at the 1968 and 1972 Games, highly significant advances were used in the world of design, the arts, aesthetics and the dynamics of movement. In Montreal the advances achieved by the Olympic Movement itself were outstanding and Moscow and Los Angeles marked important stages in the advances of the modern world.

On 17th October it was decided in Lausanne that Barcelona would host the 1992 Olympics. A momentous step has been taken but the most delicate stage is just beginning, that of working, not only to fulfil this commitment, but also to show what we Spaniards are capable of. Barcelona, Cataluña and Spain have a duty of honour and I am sure they will be able to discharge it.

At the level of understanding and friendship among the peoples of the Earth, the Olympic Movement has achieved successes that few human activities have been able to manage.

I am pleased to explain all this in the presence of H.R.H. and the illustrious persons who honour this Foundation with the desire that they see the Olympic Movement and sport as one of the noblest, most distinguished and most thrilling activities of youth in the final years of the century. And that the youth will surely enter the year 2000 with a brave, sporting and enterprising spirit which only the Olympic Movement can give.

As a result, intellectual, scientific and literary activities will achieve greater fullness and universality as they will have available a higher stronger and more worthy youth.

Thank you for your kind attention.