How London Won the Race to Host the 2012 Olympics

The submission deadline for the 2012 Olympics was on 15 July of 2003 and by this date, there were nine cities which had submitted their bids to host the 2012 Olympics. The nine cities included London, Leipzig, Istanbul, Madrid, Paris, Havana, Moscow as well as New York City.

A scored technical evaluation was carried out by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on 18 May 2004. Out of this evaluation; the number of cities was reduced to five: London, Moscow, Paris, Madrid, and New York. After this, the five cities were requested to submit their candidate files by 19 November 2004 and the International Olympic Committee visited each city during the months of February and March to carry out thorough inspection. During the inspection visit by the IOC inspection team, Paris was found to have two main drawbacks: a report came out that one of the important members of the Paris bid team was going to face corruption charges related to party political finances and there were several demonstrations and strikes that coincided with the visits.

Despite of the drawbacks that Paris was facing, the IOC released a report of the evaluation on 6 June 2005 that shown that it was the city which was most considered to be the most positive, followed closely by London. What raised many people's eyebrows was the fact that the report had no rankings or scores to show why cities were considered. Madrid and New York also received positive evaluation reports.

The appointment of Sebastian Coe as a new head of London 2012 brought a lot of improvements in the score of London against Paris. There were some reports that stated to emerge in late August 2004 that predicted a Paris London tie in the 2012 bid for the Olympics games. A neck-and-neck race between Paris and London was seen to increase in the final run to 117th IOC session. The prediction of which city between London and Paris will win was not easy and even Jacques Roggie was unable to tell when asked on 1 July 2005.

At the 117th IOC session on 6 July 2005 the final selection was announced where the first city to be eliminated was Moscow followed by New York and Madrid. London and Paris were the only two cities that were left in contention. London won to host the 2012 Olympic Games on the fourth round of voting with 54 votes while Paris was defeated with 50 votes. This brought about celebrations in London for winning but these celebrations did not last for long due to the terrorists attacks on London's transport system that occurred less than 24 hours after the 2012 Olympic Game victory was announced.

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