MADRID (AFP) — Hopes that Spain’s athletes would soon have more to do than hum or stare at the sky when their wordless national anthem is played were dashed Wednesday when the nation’s Olympic Committee said it had dropped the lyrics which it proposed last week.

“The lyrics generated controversy and were criticised on a number of occasions. We still intend to have lyrics but have withdrawn our proposal and have postponed its presentation ceremony,” the committee’s president, Alejando Blanco, told a news conference.

A six-member panel assembled by the committee selected the four-verse lyrics written by a 52-year-old unemployed man from the roughly 7,000 entries which it received. The verses had to be approved by parliament to become official.

The committee had originally intended to officially unveil the lyrics on January 21 when Spanish tenor Placido Domingo was scheduled to perform them in Madrid but daily newspaper ABC published a leaked version Friday which quicky came under fire.

The proposed lyrics start with the words: “Long Live Spain/We will all sing together/with a clear voice/and one heart” and ends with: “Justice and greatness/democracy and peace”.

The current Socialist government’s former culture minister, Carmen Calvo, said the lyrics seemed “completely antiquated” while the leader of the far-left party Izquierda Unida, Gaspar Llamazares, said they were “stale”.

In 1770 King Carlos III ordered the “Royal March”, an up-tempo military tune, to be played at public events attended by the royal family and Spaniards soon came to see it as their national anthem.

Under the right-wing dictatorship of General Francisco Franco words were used along with the “Royal March” but they were never deemed to be an official anthem.

Those lyrics, which included the line “raise your arms, sons of the Spanish people who are rising again”, were dropped following Franco’s death in 1975 because of their association to his regime.

Spain has four official languages and is made up of 17 autonomous regions, including several which reject the idea that the country has a single national identity, making a consensus on the lyrics to the anthem hard to reach.

The previous conservative government of prime minister Jose Maria Aznar charged a group of poets and writers to devise a verse for the anthem several years ago but no agreement was reached as to what the words should be.

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