How the Competition Stacks Up

In late March, a leaked IOC draft report suggested that the three front-runners for the 2012 Games were London, Paris and New York.  Agence France Presse quoted an IOC source as saying, "No one doubts that all five cities can hold a successful Olympics, but anyone who reads the report will be able to see that four are better than the fifth city and that three are better than the fourth.”

Even with this recent news, Livingstone says that the IOC voting process makes it difficult to predict an outcome or rank cities in a

hierarchy. To win, a city must receive 50 percent of the votes plus onevote.  If no bid wins on the first vote, the city with the lowest score is dropped out and members vote again. That process is repeated until one city receives the necessary number of votes.  Every time a city drops out, the landscape of the vote changes entirely – for instance, supporters of one European city may not want to vote for another European city, to boost their own city’s chances of winning a 2016 Olympiad.

Among the three front-runners, Paris is considered the favorite, because of its past experience with both bidding on and hosting the games.  The city hosted the Olympics in 1924 and in 1900.  Its bid for the 2008 Games and the 1992 Games placed second and third.

Although the controversy over the west-side stadium in New York has been resolved, New York is still the only candidate city that did not include in its bid book financial guarantees from the city of New York, New York State or the U.S. government, should the New York Organizing Committee fall short on funds.  And New York is a rookie in the bidding game – this is the first time that the city has mounted a serious bid for the Games and made it past the U.S. selection process.

Moscow’s bid has nothing exceptional going against it – but neither does it have anything exceptional going for it, according to Livingstone.  Madrid’s chances are questionable considering how recently the games were held in Barcelona.

Even the fore-runner has its problems: a shadow was cast over the IOC evaluation visit to Paris by a massive labor strike that paralyzed the city’s public transportation system, although union organizers pledged support for Paris’s 2012 bid and said the timing of the strike had nothing to do with the IOC members’ visit.  Recent allegations that former French Sports Minister Guy Drut, now a member of Paris’s bid committee, accepted bribes in the early 1990s have proved that the IOC is still suffering under a hangover from the Salt Lake City scandal and put an unwanted spotlight on Paris’s 2012 bid.

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