The 2012 London Olympic Games Selection

During the first week of July in 2005 a seminal occasion took place.Singapore was the center of the world's attention.  In the Raffles City Centre Convention Centre - the naming of which bore the hallmarks of a British colonial past - the ordinary 117th Session on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) took place.  The purpose was to meet and vote to pick the venue to host the XXX modern Olympiad.At the start, there had been 9 cities vying to stage the 2012 Olympic Games.  On the 18th May 2004, these were whittled down to 5 main hopefuls.  Havana, Istanbul, Leipzig and Rio de Janeiro had been unable to persuade on technical factors and were removed from the continuing procedure.5 names were offered to the ultimate voting mechanism.  The cities chosen for the eventual judgement were London, Madrid, Moscow, New York and Paris.  Of these, Paris carried the burden of being the front runner.So, the fated day in 2005 finally arrived and the IOC met in Singapore to undertake a decision that would carry with it profound economic significance.The procedure. was basic.  Each of 104 approved IOC attendees would take part in a series of secret ballots.  After each vote, if no candidate city had attained an 50% plus majority of the votes cast, the city with the least votes would drop out and a following ballot be undertaken.After some nervous rounds of voting, the three paramount contenders emerged from the five short-listed candidates. London, Madrid and Paris.  Moscow had fallen at the first hurdle and New York was eliminated after the second vote.Contrary to the fact that Madrid and London had both polled more votes than Paris in the first two ballots, the French capital was still deemed by many as the most likely to achieve the eventual prize.  Due to the intricacies of the voting plans of some IOC delegates, at the next to last voting stage, Madrid, which had topped the second ballot with 32 votes, was flushed out collecting only 31 votes.  This left London opposing Paris in the ultimate voting round.The widely held assumption of the press and professional soothsayers was that Paris "had it in the bag".London's bid had previously been evaluated as having many positive elements in reports drawn up by the IOC in 2004 and 2005. However, the general opinion within the various IOC evaluation committees was that Paris held the advantage over its cross-channel opponent.The recent past also appeared to be against the United Kingdom.  Prior proposals by Birmingham (1992) and twice by Manchester (1996 and 2000) had all been ineffectual.  The record was regarded as rather feeble.Paris, on the other hand, had impressively bid for the 1992 Summer Olympics and then again in 2008, when it came 3rd behind odds on favourite Beijing.  The general thinking in the run up to the 117th IOC Session was that Paris was owed a successful bid.The final result is now history.  Celebrations by the UK team within the Convention Centre were more than matched by untamed cries of joy from a large crowd keeping an eye on the proceedings live on huge screens put up in Trafalgar Square, Central London.  The whereabouts of the home crowd was, perhaps, foretelling - the Battle of Trafalgar being perhaps the most eminent of British victories over their long time foe.So, London became the first city to have the privilege of hosting the modern Olympiad three times, having had the honour in the summer's of 1908 and 1948.But, what will be the unavoidable financial burden to London and its taxpayers?  Can the British capital accomplish the elusive feat of hosting a modern Olympics and if truth be told make a net profit from it?  Or, will a by-product of debt hang around long after the visual athletic glories, that surely await us in the Autumn of 2012?The solution to those dilemmas will form part of history as well, long after the medals haul of 2012 has faded from memory, only to live on in the words and media images to be viewed by coming generations.