PARIS will announce its bid to host the 2012 Olympics today, aiming to eclipse London, New York and other rivals with Gallic style and dazzling venues located close to the heart of the city.

With backing from President Chirac and the entire political establishment, Bertrand Delanoe, the Mayor, will present a revamped version of the city’s unsuccessful plan for the 2008 Games. The bid, to be unveiled with solemnity in the baronial Hôtel de Ville this morning, is expected to cost around £4 billion, or double the previous budget.

M Delanoe, whose political future will ride on the project, has taken close control after worrying for months about the wisdom of risking a second failed Paris candidacy.

The centrepiece will be the Stade de France, the avant-garde 80,000-seat stadium at St Denis, a northern suburb, which was built for the 1998 World Cup. However, M Delanoe, a Socialist elected in 2001, aims to bring the Games into the heart of the city.

Unlike London, with its proposed venues scattered in urban sprawl, Paris intends to stage events in some of its most beautiful quarters, according to leaks from the mayoral team. Show jumping is to be held on the Esplanade des Invalides, home of Napoleon’s tomb close to the Eiffel Tower, and fencing in the Grand Palais, just off the Avenue des Champs Elysées.

The Olympic village would not be built in the suburbs, as planned for 2008, but within the city proper, in the northwestern 17th arrondissement.

The French have good reasons for believing that, in a fair competition, Paris should have the edge. The summer Olympics have not been staged in France since 1924, the Chariots of Fire Games. Paris was encouraged in January when Jacques Rogge, the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), discussed the bid with M Chirac and said: “France and Paris have everything necessary for an excellent Games.”

As well as its traditional glories, the city boasts a superb transport system and hotel capacity that comes with being the world’s most visited city. France proved itself with the successful World Cup, and its organisational skills will be on show again in August when the World Athletics Championships are held at the Stade de France. With its system of strong centralised authority, France tends to push through big projects on time.

Most of the Olympic facilities already exist. The main new ones will be a basketball Superdome, likely to be built at the Porte de la Chapelle, just north of Montmartre, a swimming pool at Pantin, on the eastern side of the city, and a media village, probably at Daumesnil, east of the Place de la Bastille.

One of the most costly aspects of the project, to be financed from public and private investment, will be the need to cover over a stretch of the Boulevard Périphérique, the ring motorway that fences off Paris from the outskirts.

Parisians consider Madrid a weak rival because the Olympics were held in Barclona in 1992. London is deemed to suffer from its crumbling infrastructure and lack of a political consensus behind the Games plan, plus Britain’s poor reputation for organising big public events. The serious competition is perceived to come from New York, which, commentators say, now combines media and commercial power with its aura of a “martyr city”.

However, M Delanoe and his team are trying to avoid giving an impression of over-confidence. Although the Mayor inherited the previous bid on his election only a month before the final choice, he felt humiliated by the 2001 fiasco.

The plan for 2008 was widely deemed to be strong, but an over-confident Paris team, under Mayor Jean Tiberi, failed to perform the requisite lobbying at the IOC. The city was duly eliminated in the first round of voting, coming in behind Istanbul.

“The scar of that failed bid has lasted longer than anyone imagined it would,”an article in Le Monde said earlier this year.

M Chirac, who served for 17 years as Mayor of Paris, has grown impatient with what he saw as dithering by M Delanoe, a left-wing politician whose nervous style contrasts with the extrovert self-assurance of the conservative French President.

Before announcing the bid, the Mayor wanted to make sure in advance, via the IOC, that Paris stood a good chance of winning the Games, according to insiders.

To win all-party backing for the project, M Delanoe is expected to bring associates of the President into management of the candidacy. He is said to have ruled out suggestions that it should be headed by a sports celebrity.

The Mayor has been playing coy, refusing to confirm an imminent bid and ordering his staff to say nothing. However, hints are being dropped with enigmatic posters which have appeared over the past week on municipal bus-shelters.

These just show a stylised, heart-shaped outline. From tomorrow, this will be revealed as the logo for “Paris 2012”.

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