If you can remember what keeps the Olympic flame alive — the simple dignity of human athletic performance — hold on to that thought. This weekend the Olympic rings are being turned into a five-ring circus in Singapore.There are politicians and profiteers, there are new celebrities and old legends, and there is this privileged body of 116 men and women on the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
On Wednesday they will decide, by secret, electronic ballot, whether Paris, London, Madrid, Moscow or New York — quite possibly in that order — gets to host the 2012 Olympiad. It is hard to keep a clear head in the glistening tower block of Raffles City Convention Centre, where tinted glass and white marble dominate, and realise that there is a sporting ideal at stake here. Yet the vote will not necessarily go to the best candidate, and that is why the bidding cities are wheeling out legendary athletes such as Muhammad Ali, who has trouble recalling how brilliantly he won his gold medal and his world titles.
Paris is the front-runner. London is believed to be closing in. But nobody really knows, and because of such intrigue there are frantic efforts to fly in planeloads of supporters, from athletes to actors, to add glitz to the canvassing.
Away from the gathering zoo of important bystanders, Sebastian Coe, the leader of the London bid, has been honing the most important speech of his lifetime. Come what may on Wednesday, Lord Coe has proved a calm and ceaseless campaigner for his city, and, as the only Olympian leading a bid, has measured his kick into the final bend as meticulously as he knows how.
He has the inside track in one, possibly influential sense. The Olympic movement has changed over the decades. There are now a third of the IOC members who, like Coe, actually won Olympic medals, and at least as many again who serve in full-time sports administration. They know him as Seb, they regard him as one of them, yet Coe admits: “I smile benignly when people tell me that they know the way this vote is going. I have to be diplomatic, but inside I’m thinking: you don ’t know. You cannot know, because I’m working at it day and night, and I don’t know.”
He has the outward look of calm. The sports shirt, white shorts and sports shoes give the appearance of leisure, but the importance of this week was indicated by the fact that Coe and his chief executive, Keith Mills, the two men who must get their message exactly right on the day, travelled here by separate airlines in case one plane went down.
Over at Raffles, Jacques Rogge, the Belgian president of the IOC, has been speculating. He has suggested the outcome could be within half a dozen votes, possibly down to a single vote in the end. But even to their president, the lips of so many of the members are sealed. “Every one of the five candidates says their bid is the best, and the press say the same,” Rogge says. “They try to read between the lines. It’s like your wife says you’re handsome, and you interpret it to mean you’re the best-looking man in the world.”
Between now and Wednesday lunchtime, when Rogge reads out the winning name, this game of words will reach the pitch of the high temperatures and high humidity in Singapore. But because of the clean-up that Rogge has performed — the removal of 10 corrupt former IOC members who were caught selling their votes for favours — the intentions of the committee are less predictable than before.
Time was when we could see or smell, even if we could not prove, where blocks of votes were being bought. The intrusion of politics becomes unavoidable, but with politicians comes the inevitable scepticism that they will promise you everything to get your vote.
Thus Jacques Chirac, the French president, thinks he has got one over Tony Blair by managing to delay his flight to Gleneagles for the G8 summit because the French presentation is at 9am on Wednesday. London, by contrast, pitches in the afternoon, when even with the time difference across the world, the prime minister could not get to Scotland in time.
But who can be sure that having your political figurehead at the 45-minute presentation is a vote-winner? Who knows whether the IOC members want to hear the voices of politicians? New York has nevertheless played a trump card in flying over Hillary Rodham Clinton. The former First Lady, as she is being billed, has already begun telling IOC members that “the Olympics have long held a special place in my heart, and I have seen the power of the Games first-hand”.
Those words are not too dissimilar to the oratory of a lady who persuaded the predominantly male IOC club members in 1997 to take the Games “home” to Athens for 2004. Gianna Angelopoulos asked the IOC to give the Games back to Athens after the appallingly commercial Olympics of Atlanta in 1996. She spoke emotively of rounding the century-old circle of the reborn Olympics and of giving the Games to the future of young Athenians. She visibly outperformed Nelson Mandela’s cameo part in seeking to take the Olympics to Cape Town. She made a far more persuasive impression than did Luciano Pavarotti on behalf of Rome.
However, there was believed to be “horse trading” behind the auditorium in Lausanne where that vote was held. It was rumoured that Mrs Angelopoulos and President Mandela had made a pact that, whichever of their bids was eliminated first, they would ask their supporters to back the other one. The figures stack up. Cape Town fell at the fourth ballot. Its 20 votes were split six to Rome and, decisively, 14 to Athens.
