Olympics/Bidding for 2012 Games: Tom Humphries, who will be reporting from Singapore from Monday, looks at the credentials of the candidate cities for the 2012 Games

Less than three years ago New York city beat off the competition from four other US rivals and won the right to bid on behalf of the USA for the right to host the 2012 Olympic Games.

In the Big Apple the affair was widely reported as a done deal. Champagne corks popped in the background. The Olympics were on the way to New York! And why not? In the wake of 9/11 the city's sense of victimhood was still keen. Who could deny the restorative powers of the Olympic Games to the world's city?

On Wednesday, in Singapore, in Raffles Hotel, the New Yorkers will get the final tutorial in what has been a tough course in the unsentimental truths of Olympic realpolitik. The city will most likely struggle to squeeze crumbling Moscow into fifth place in a five-horse race. That the European vote will be split four ways will scarcely matter. The Games will be returning to the old world. New York as it turns out needed Tammany Hall, not sentiment.

People wonder sometimes what draws International Olympic Committee members to the business of full-time blazering. There are some undoubtedly who crave the chance to get their paws into the honey. Others like the prestige, the travel. A sizeable number, though, are addicted to the politics, which is more complex than any game in the world.

What happens at Raffles Hotel next week is the high mass of politicking. Figures like Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac will come to Singapore and prostrate themselves before the IOC. In the background the worker bees will swarm and smarm all over the IOC members. And the possibilities and permutations will be complex enough to cause braidamage to a tally man.

All that is certain is nothing is certain.

Coming into the final stretch even the smart money might see some reason to shift itself from where it has always been. Paris have been the frontrunner for so long their bid has started to look stale. The French, with a soccer World Cup behind them and a rugby World Cup in front of them, have shown themselves to be competent, sometimes sparkling, hosts but they are leaking faster than the pool at Abbotstown.

That's how hard and unpredictable it is. The French came into the race on the back of two losing bids. They knew better than anyone the process takes place underground, votes are won by contacts made at little meetings of little Olympic sub-committees held in far-flung places at inconvenient times. They knew, too, momentum is the great intangible.

SO WHO will win and who will be humiliated? Those in the know claim it's neck and neck at both ends of the race. For the sackcloth and ashes New York has gained ground. The Americans put together a good lobby group whose genial but insistent hand-pressing hasn't been sufficient to banish bigger matters. Iraq might be playing badly at home in the heartland right now. It has always played badly with the IOC constituency.

Then there are the problems which have beset the US Olympic movement. The Americans might once have won Olympic dressage events in sporting morality so much time did they spend preening themselves upon their high horses. Now in the wake of the Wade Exum affair (Olympic CEO suing his own organisation) and the Balco business (high-profile Olympians with as yet unexplained connections to dodgy dope outfit) it's payback time.

And of course there is the disarray in which the New York bid finds itself. Mayor Bloomberg's long-touted ambition to build an Olympic Stadium on the west side of Manhattan crumbled last month at just the wrong time. The bid team put a hasty band aid over the disaster with the instant production of Plan B, a promise to build a new Olympic facility out at Shea Stadium, where the New York Mets play baseball.

Clumsily, New York announced the stadium would be refitted for baseball after the Games. All this was perhaps a little too redolent of the Atlanta business, where the stadium was sawed down and reconfigured, just about erasing what legacy there was from the worst Olympics in memory.

Into the gap has stepped Moscow. With no chance of winning the Muscovites have been playing the thin end of the field smartly, appealing to former Soviet states and friends to at least spare them the ignominy of last place and to deliver that special humiliation to New York.

In this matter they have some unlikely allies. Former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch has been working effectively on behalf of Madrid. This development is further bad news for the New Yorkers. Samaranch's career as a diplomat and an Olympian owes much to Moscow and he has always retained great affection for the place. The old warhorse has been calling in old favours and to secure votes for Madrid when Moscow falls. That means promising votes to Moscow in the first round.

All of which leaves three contenders, of which Paris remains the slender favourite, being caught all the while by London, and Madrid needing a freak outcome in the first round to stay in the game.

So to Madrid first. The Spanish have a lot going for them, not least their enthusiasm. The IOC's wish to reduce the cost of the Games is best served by Madrid's bid, which has an Olympic operating budget of a1.6 billion and a separate infrastructure budget of a1.2 billion.

In Madrid 21 of the 35 planned venues have been built, two are being refurbished, five are under construction, and six are awaiting a final go-ahead. The city has hosted nearly 90 sports events in the past four years, including the European Swimming Championships and European Indoor Track Championships and guarantees the sort of blue skies and splendid backdrops NBC television craves.

There is a downside. Security issues are more of a concern with Spain, and Madrid has failed to provide satisfactory answers to IOC concerns over the number of hotel rooms which will be available.

What Madrid needs is an unpredictable first round or two. As a credible middle-ground candidate the bid is walking a tightrope, "lending out" some guaranteed votes to a weaker bid like Moscow in the hope of getting them back with interest, but hoping also the widespread mortgaging of votes in the first round or so might bring a surprise exit for Paris or London.

It can happen. Three years ago when the IOC gathered in Prague to look at the 2010 Winter Olympics, most members expected Salzburg to win the race. Pyonchang, the desolate and culturally insulated capital of North Korea, was there as the lame-duck candidate and Vancouver was expected to perform respectably. After each round of voting IOC members are told which city has been eliminated, not how many votes each city garnered. Vancouver won out in Prague, which surprised many. Salzburg beat Pyonchang by just four votes, which stunned everyone. If Paris or London have banked on lending out too many votes early on a freak result might be on the cards as the Spanish have a solid Latino vote plus the Samaranch diehards backing them.

In all likelihood Paris and London will slug it out to the end. Three months ago a London win was unthinkable. This weekend the odds grow thinner by the hour.

In the final days of bidding it is reckoned that a maximum of about 20 votes are still uncommitted. By all estimates this is more than the gap dividing the French and English. By most reckoning, too, London have the better lobbying team.

AFTER A FAULTY start with the appointment of brash American businesswoman Barbara Cassani the London bid has been proactive in anticipating IOC quibbles about the nature of their bid.

Sebastian Coe, who replaced Cassani, is a little too much of an old-style English stuffed shirt for many IOC members, but he has worked his audience well and the real powerhouse of the bid has been the CEO, Keith Mills. Mills is a self-made man, having invented the concept of air miles and sold the idea for considerable profit. He, a genial and self-effacing glad-hand, picked a team of eight or so similar characters to do the hard lobbying over the last 18 months. The London lobbying team are multilingual and easy-going and know their stuff.

They contrast favourably with the French outfit, some of whom can't, or won't, use English, and very few of whom are natural gladhanders. Of the legendary, haughty French IOC member former French skier Jean-Claude Killy it has been said he isn't merely arrogant but "he acts as if he invented arrogance". The French suffer on that level and will do so in Singapore.

Much has been made of the fact Blair will have to leave Singapore before the vote on Wednesday to get to the G8 summit on time. Chirac is staying on for an extra seven or eight hours. The difference is Blair will be in town for three days before Chirac arrives and Blair is one of the world's most gifted flesh-pressers. IOC member after IOC member will be having tea with Tony and Cherie at the British Embassy. The French, by contract, have promised to walk Chirac through the lobby of Raffles Hotel a few times, on the basis his visibility will compensate for his lack of affability.

The London bid, like the Paris bid, is technically excellent. The difference lies in the things we can't see. Like the in-house popularity of the president of the IOC, Monsieur Jacques Rogge. Rogge hasn't been long in the job but his frazzled features, his reluctance to delegate and his lack of political nous have made him something of a lame duck. He comes to Singapore riding a slough of disapproval and having made it quite plain he wishes Paris to win.

One might preclude the other. Rogge, an honest campaigner on matters such as drugs in sport, corruption and cutting down on the inherent giganticism of the Games, has a heavy hand upon the tiller in a job which requires some political nippiness.

The IOC offices in Lausanne are in constant turmoil about his style of management and the IOC members themselves arrive at their Singapore hotel in unprecedented foul humour. A couple of years ago at an annual session in Mexico, Rogge was humiliated when his bid to have baseball, softball and modern pentathlon eliminated from the summer Games was defeated. Instead of learning his lesson Rogge has decided to attack the issue head on and at this IOC session every sport on the summer programme is up for election.

This has soured the IOC membership in two key ways. Firstly with the eyes of the world on them the blazers are likely to make some kind of screw-up. Any sport acquiring less than 50 per cent approval will be dropped from the summer schedule (for a sport to be adopted to the programme will require a 75 per cent approval). Most IOC members are administrators and government appointees. Ironically they don't know too much about sport. Some sports will lose out. All hell will break loose.

Secondly, under Rogge's draconian ethics rules the IOC members can scarcely eat a Ferrero Rocher at an ambassador's reception let alone respond to the supplications of federations who have been lobbying all year and whining for IOC members to come to this event or that event at the expense of a federation. The IOC members have had a year of shaking their heads.

Rogge, although officially remaining neutral, hasn't just forced some French votes into the London camp but has evened things out with his ineptitude. On the day after the election of a host city the IOC members will be forced to deal with the expulsion of Ivan Slavkov, the Bulgarian member accused in a BBC Panorama programme last summer of allegedly being open to bribery. Slavkov will go but not without a fight and is planning on being in Singapore if only to make the firing squad stare him in the eyes.

Not only does the prospect make some IOC members uneasy but they blame the BBC and the English media. On such small and seemingly insignificant pinpricks to pride and vanity will the most prestigious race in world sport be won and lost.

As for ourselves, and the no-doubt-soon-

to-be exhumed caper of an Irish Olympics, leaky, roofless national swimming pool notwithstanding? In the course of the bidding process a few major European nations made discreet inquiries about the possibility of having pre-Games training camps in Ireland in the event of a London win. With some regret and embarrassment it had to be conceded we hadn't the facilities.