Twenty Twenty: The bid that shouldn't be?

While the British honours system and Sports Personality of the Year have brought the London Olympics orgy to an end, it seems only appropriate to remind you what will happen on 7 January. Don't worry, it's not another awards ceremony, it is far duller than even that.

Submitting official bid books ranks pretty low on the excitement levels created by the Olympics, but this coming Monday is the day for the submission of the bid books for the 2020 Olympics. There will be three bids: Istanbul, Tokyo and Madrid.

Having managed to fail to secure the Games on the last two occasions, Madrid is hoping it will be third time lucky when Jacques Rogge picks the lucky number on 7 September in Buenos Aires. There's fortuitous you might think. Argentine capital, Spanish speaking, Lionel Messi and all that; Madrid must be a banker to get pulled out in September. It might have been before the Argentine president started going around nationalising Repsol's interests, but even this slight hiccup in fraternal  Hispanidad relations probably isn't sufficient to scupper Madrid's chances and make all parties look decidedly embarrassed when they pitch up in Buenos Aires for the grand un-opening of the Olympic envelope.

There is a far greater risk to Madrid's bid, and I suspect you all know what it is. Money. The absence thereof. If there is any money, whose is it going to be? Because it won't be Spain's. It will be numbered notes from the IMF or the ECB, and neither of them, one would imagine, would be overly keen to see great wads of cash being thrown at an Olympics, least of all by a country with a well-earned reputation for turning major projects into nice little earners for all manner of politicians and others. 

In the scheme of things, the 16 million euros that have apparently been spent thus far do not represent a huge amount, but of this spend, there have been one or two embarrassments, such as the report which, so it has been claimed, ran to a cost of nearly 700,000 euros but which proved to be worthless because one particular bank appeared as the main private-sector partner for the Olympics. Which bank do you think this might have been? If you reckon Bankia, then you have earned yourself a gold medal, one that isn't gold at all but is made out of worthless fool's gold. The mind boggles not only at the fact that someone was daft enough to even involve Bankia but also because of the associations the bank has (political involvement and a spot of alleged malfeasance).

In fact, Madrid's application document was pretty impressive. But then, producing a report detailing the application is one of the easier parts of the process. It was littered with the usual guff about what the Games would bring as well as all the stuff necessary to deal with accommodation, press, security and so on. However, other aspects of the preliminaries haven't been quite so impressive. The Games logo was unveiled to general bafflement and criticism. It looks like five flip-flops was one quip. One of the promotional videos (pura pasión) has been slated for the fact that it features flamenco, which isn't representative of Madrid, and people sitting around at cafés doing very little.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't quibble with Madrid's ambitions for the Games. But circumstances aren't normal. Were Madrid to be pulled out on 7 September, one can but only imagine the reaction of a shocked world that the capital of a country in such dire financial straits could be. It is no argument to suggest that the economy might be in better shape in seven years time, as commitments would have to start this year, were Madrid to win. And some of those commitments would come from the city of Madrid itself, already cash-strapped and in debt.

It wouldn't only be the infrastructure that would need funding, there would be the athletes as well. Spain would not have been as successful as it was at the 1992 Games had it not been for special funding. Its performances before Barcelona were poor and they have not come to close to matching those of 1992 since. The Spanish Olympic Committee just doesn't have the money. So where would this come from?

Monday marks only a further step along the way. The IOC evaluation commission will visit the candidate cities in March, report some time after, and the cities will brief IOC members in June. And on 7 September, the decision will be announced. Madrid? Well, part of me hopes that it succeeds. But it is a part that most certainly isn't my head.


QUIZ: "Libra, and my name is Charles. Now I like a woman that's quiet." It was of course The Floaters and it was truly awful. "Twenty Twenty". This was the 15th studio album by which American group?


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