Battle for rights to host ‘12 Olympics near end
Fast forward seven years from now. Picture the possible scenes:
Beach volleyball at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Tennis at Wimbledon. Basketball at Madison Square Garden. Soccer at Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium. Gymnastics a short hop from the Kremlin.
It’s the ultimate global beauty pageant, with five of the world’s iconic cities – Paris, London, New York, Madrid and Moscow – vying for the right to host the 2012 Summer Olympics.
After a two-year campaign, the most glamorous bid contest in Olympic history comes to a climactic vote Wednesday in a convention hall in Singapore.
At stake is international prestige, billions of dollars in investment and economic spinoffs, and the honor of staging the world’s biggest sports festival.
Paris, the longtime front-runner, goes in as the favorite, with London regarded as the main challenger. But anything could happen in secret balloting by the International Olympic Committee.
“For probably the first time in the history of the Olympic movement, the IOC is presented with a list of cities all of whom are capable of hosting excellent Olympic Games,” IOC president Jacques Rogge said Thursday.
“So, on the one hand, you can say that the IOC is in a very fortunate position. On the other hand, it makes the choice arguably more difficult than ever.”
The bid cities believe a significant number of IOC members remain undecided. Much could depend on the candidates’ final presentations to the IOC and the order in which cities are eliminated in the round-by-round balloting.
“If I were betting on it, I’d say it’s theirs to lose,” Canadian IOC member Dick Pound said of Paris. “It would be London’s to win. It depends who’s the best on the day.”
British bookmakers list the French capital as an overwhelming 1-6 favorite, followed by London at 7-2. Madrid and New York are rated as outsiders and Moscow a long shot.
“I think it would be very surprising if Paris doesn’t win,” said John MacAloon, a University of Chicago professor and Olympic historian. “There seems to be a real bandwagon at this point. It seems to me it’s pretty much a done deal. It’s hard to imagine a disaster that could knock Paris off track.”
But Gerhard Heiberg, an IOC executive board member from Norway and co-organizer of the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, isn’t so certain.
“I’m not convinced that Paris is front-runner any more,” he said. “Some months ago I felt that, but today I’m not so sure any more.”
New York’s bid underwent an 11th-hour upheaval after state officials rejected a proposed showpiece $2 billion Olympic stadium on Manhattan’s West Side. New York quickly came up with an alternative plan to use a $600 million stadium in the less-fashionable borough of Queens that eventually would replace Shea Stadium as the home of the Mets.
“I think we have regained momentum,” New York bid leader and deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff said this week. “I’m very optimistic going in to Singapore. … People recognize that when tested, we will always find a way. We faced the toughest test you could possibly face and responded with an excellent plan within three days.”
Rogge, who will open a sealed envelope to announce the winner in a live televised ceremony, has said the race could be decided by half a dozen votes or so among the 100-plus eligible members.
While some members may vote on the technical merits of the bids, others may make their choice based on emotion, sentiment, geography, politics or self-interest.
The final 45-minute presentations on Wednesday – featuring emotive videos – should carry more weight than usual because members were barred from visiting the bid cities under ethics rules enacted after the Salt Lake City scandal. Conventional wisdom says cities stand to lose more from a poor presentation than gain from a strong one.
The cities are leaving nothing to chance, bringing a glitzy array of political leaders, athletes and celebrities to this Asian city-state to pitch their case.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and England soccer captain David Beckham will be lobbying for London, French President Jacques Chirac for Paris, Spain’s Queen Sofia and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero for Madrid, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Muhammad Ali for New York, and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov for Moscow.
About 3,500 people have been accredited for the Olympic gathering at the Raffles City Convention Center. More than 2,000 armed police, military and civil defense officers will be on security duty.
The dynamics of this bid competition are sharply different from the two most recent summer Olympic races. Athens won the 2004 Games because of strong sentiment in favor of bringing the Olympics back to their birthplace, while Beijing was selected for 2008 out of a political will to take the games for the first time to the world’s most populous nation.
No such defining factors are at play this time.
“It doesn’t seem that anybody has a killer weakness or an absolute showstopper case for,” Pound said.
The vagaries of the voting system could cause some surprises.
In the first round, exactly 100 members are eligible to vote — members from countries with bid cities can’t vote while their candidate is still in the race. The city with the fewest votes goes out after each round until one candidate receives a winning majority.
As cities are eliminated, members from those countries can jump into the voting – meaning there will be more voters in each subsequent round. In other words, if New York gets eliminated early, the four U.S. members become eligible to vote in later rounds.
Barring a surprise first-round win, the result will hinge on which cities go out when and where their votes go in subsequent rounds.
While many believe Moscow will be eliminated first, the Russian capital could benefit from sympathy votes in the opening round that would put others – mainly New York – in potential danger.
John Furlong, who led Vancouver’s winning bid for the 2010 Winter Olympics, can attest to the uncertainty. The Canadian city went in as the big favorite, but only squeaked past little-known Pyeongchang, South Korea, 56-53 in the final round.
“Members want to be nice, but you never really are sure about your support,” Furlong said. “You can have all the support you need and none of it. I’m just glad I’m only a spectator this time.”
Paris, which last hosted the Olympics in 1924, is bidding for a third time after failed attempts for the 1992 and 2008 Games. The IOC tends to reward cities that keep trying – Athens got the Olympics after losing to Atlanta for 1996; Beijing came back after defeat to Sydney for 2000.
Paris, which would use more than a dozen temporary venues, says its bid most closely adheres to the IOC’s model for streamlining the size and cost of the games. Paris also has an existing Olympic stadium, the Stade de France, which hosted the final of the 1998 World Cup and the 2003 world track and field championships.
The Paris 2012 committee, led by Philippe Baudillon, is considered more humble than the previous 2008 bid team, which was seen as arrogant and wound up getting fewer votes than Istanbul in the first round of voting.
But Paris also must contend with the burden of being considered the favorite for so long. Also, there is a widespread perception that the IOC administration supports Paris. An IOC evaluation report issued a month ago gave Paris a glowing review with no negative comments. Any perceived favoritism could cause a backlash among some members.
London, which last held the games in 1948, has benefited from the high-profile efforts of bid leader Sebastian Coe – a two-time Olympic champion in the 1,500 meters – and the strong support of Blair.
The bid is centered on the regeneration of a run-down area of east London, where a 500-acre plot of land would be transformed into a main Olympic precinct and one of the largest urban parks in Europe.
“If there is a unique selling point for London, it is the legacy,” Blair said. “We’re bidding not just for the 17 days or three weeks that the games are on – we’re bidding for the time before and after.”
Doctoroff has run a highly praised campaign for New York, but many still believe the Big Apple has little chance because of anti-American or anti-Bush sentiment in the European-dominated IOC.
“There are members who intended all along to register their displeasure with American foreign policy,” MacAloon said. “The stadium controversy gives them a reason to do that earlier rather than later. It’s hard to imagine now that New York could get past the second round.”