Josep Elías i Juncosa

Josep Elías Juncosa (27 May 1880 – 28 January 1944) was a Spanish sports journalist and athlete, who played football as a midfielder for FC Barcelona between 1900 and 1903, although he never played an official match for the club.

He was the first sports journalist to write in Catalan; he contributed to many newspapers and magazines of his time and was, together with Narciso Masferrer, the foundational driving force behind the sports press in Catalonia. He was a key promoter of sports in Catalonia in the first third of the 20th century, helping to create a multitude of sports federations, such as the Spanish Cycling Union, the Spanish Gymnastics Federation, the Catalan Sports Confederation, and also several clubs, such as the Barcelona Swimming Club, FC Barcelona, Sportsmen's Club, Catalunya Lawn Tennis Club, and Hiking Club of Catalonia.

He was involved in other projects that were crucial to Spanish sport, including the creation of the Olympic Committee of Catalonia in 1913,

Early life and education Born in Tarragona on 27 May 1880, Elías was the second of seven children, and was eight years old when his family emigrated to Buenos Aires in what seems to be a family tradition, since his mother, Teresa Juncosa, had been born in Uruguay during their parents' visit to that country. Their journey only lasted a year, because, in 1889, they returned to Spain, settling in Barcelona, where Elías grew up. Either way, he was one of its co-founders and one of the first ten members of FC Barcelona.

Later when he became a journalist, he recalled having witnessed football matches at the Hippodrome of Can Tunis in early 1893, aged 13, between members of the Club de Regatas and Barcelona Football Club, the first-ever incarnation of FC Barcelona that mainly consisted not only of players from the British colony of Barcelona, but also of Catalans, with Elías remembering his fellow sports journalist Alberto Serra as one of the first Catalan footballers. He went on to write almost 500 articles about Barça from 1899 to 1936, with some of them being among the most important and insightful testimonies in the early history of the club. In September 1911, he wrote several articles in the newspaper La Veu de Catalunya in which he vindicated the need to send Catalan athletes to the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. In his conferences he stated that the COE was "like the dog in the manger, it neither does nor lets things be done" and described its leaders as "lazy".

Elias's campaign against the inactivity of the COE reached its peak on 19 October 1913, when he gave the infamous conference that marked the starting point of Catalan Olympism. In this conference, he stated that a Catalan Olympic Committee would send a delegation to 1916 Summer Olympics in Berlin in case a Spanish delegation was not achieved, a statement that was echoed and reproduced in various media, which prompted Villamejo to ask for help from the Catalan sports leaders, so that Spain would be in the Olympic Games in a letter addressed to Masferrer. Having been forced to accept a Catalan regional committee dependent of the COE, Villamejor became suspicious of Elias' true intentions, so he wrote to Coubertin on 5 January 1914, stating: "I see that you are aware of all the agitation promoted in Barcelona by Mr. Elias Juncosa. It is always the same story, they want to consider themselves independent, without wanting to understand that their only right of existence is to be Spanish". With the blessing of Coubertin, his wife Campins became the first Spanish interpreter of the Olympic Hymn in 1916.

Elías played a key role in the first Barcelona candidatures to host the Olympic Games in 1924 and 1936, which ended up being held by Paris and Berlin, respectively. On 21 January 1922, he participated in the assembly of entities and personalities Catalans who constituted the so-called Sports Confederation of Catalonia.

In 1924, on the occasion of his silver anniversary in journalism, his friends gave him the "Corredisses", a yacht of six meters in length and a crew that often consisted of only two of his children; he used this yacht to repeatedly toured the Mediterranean coasts.

Despite his importance in the history of Catalan sport, Elias does not have any recognition in his hometown, such as a street or a sports facility named after him, or a plaque on the house where he was born. On 17 October 2018, he was posthumously awarded the Diploma of Sporting Merit by the City Council, which means that his figure is beginning to be vindicated. And indeed, it was not until a century after the first article signed by Corredisses that his descendants began vindicating a figure who "goes beyond journalism". 12 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren and 11 great-great-grandchildren of Elias signed a letter sent to Josep Maria Bartomeu, the then Barcelona president, in which they requested "formal recognition" of their ancestor "as founder of the club in 1899".

Works

Football Asociación (1914) Els Jocs de Pilota. Noticia i Regles (1917) Exercicis de Mar (1918) Els Jocs Olímpics a l'antiga Grècia (1920) Per la mar (1933)