Against all odds: 20 years since London was awarded the 2012 Olympic Games
Sebastian Coe sits down for an exclusive interview with the Zeus Files and recalls how London 2012 caused one of the biggest upsets in Olympic bidding history
It was 20 years ago today that Sebastian Coe was in the Raffles City Convention Centre in Singapore watching International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge struggle to open a heavily sealed envelope before finally managing to rip it open.
“The International Olympic Committee has the honour of announcing the Games of the 30th Olympiad in 2012 are awarded to the city of London,” announced Rogge to the delight of Coe and the rest of the delegates in the hall, who reacted ecstatically, leaping up and hugging one another.
There was also jubilation, 7,000 miles away, London’s Trafalgar Square, where several hundred supporters of the bid had gathered and in Stratford, in the east of the city, near where the Olympic and Paralympics were set to spark a regeneration programme the like of which Britain had not seen since the end of World War Two.
In contrast, the shoulders of the Paris delegation in Singapore slumped with shock and disappointment, while crowds watching at the city hall in a French capital reacted with dismay at the city’s failure to win the Games despite bidding three times in the last 20 years.
The despondency of the Paris 2012 team was understandable. They had been the overwhelming favourites to host the Olympics for the first time in 88 years since the process had been launched two years earlier. Right up to the vote, most of the world’s media, including those in Britain, had been predicting they would win easily.
Indeed, little more than a year before the vote on July 6, 2005, there had been such concern among some leading officials in Britain that they were urging that the bid be dropped amid warnings that it was facing international embarrassment. Coe was appointed as London 2012 chairman the day after the IOC had shortlisted the bid as one of five candidate cities but ranked it behind Paris and Madrid and only marginally ahead of Moscow and New York City, and warned that it had no chance of succeeding unless it made improvements in several areas, particularly transport.
Coe was drafted in to replace American businesswoman Barbara Cassani, founder of budget airline Go. Although Cassini was comfortable with the bid’s technical aspects, glad-handing IOC dignitaries in the bars of five-star hotels was not her strong suit. This was clear from the time of her first official visit as head of the bid to the IOC Session in Prague in May 2003. After treating the small group of travelling British journalists attending the event in the Czechia capital to a bottle of wine, she stood up and announced that she was heading to bed as she wanted to be up at 6am to use the hotel keep-fit room. “You won’t meet many IOC members in the gym in the morning,” one veteran reporter of the IOC scene told her as she left the table.
When Cassani had launched the London 2012 bid, Coe’s name had been conspicuous by its absence. The fact that a British double Olympic gold medallist with close contacts at the IOC had been so publicly snubbed was blamed on the Labour Government under Tony Blair not being keen to hand a key role to a former Conservative Member of Parliament.
I remember in July 2003 during an athletics meeting at Crystal Palace, by which time it was already obvious that Cassani was not suited to her role, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell invited a group of journalists, including myself, the late Alan Hubbard of The Observer, Neil Wilson of the Daily Mail and Colin Hart of The Sun, for a chat to discuss the bid. We were all of the same opinion that Coe needed to be given a senior role if London’s campaign was not headed for a complete wipe-out.
“I remember sitting down with her and she didn’t really want to appoint me as anything, in the end there was so much pressure that she offered me a job being the chair of a group of celebrities,” Coe recalled in an exclusive interview with the Zeus Files. “I went, ‘Barbara, I don’t do that really. I’m really happy to continue to do what I’m doing, which is I’m out and about all the time within sport and business and of course I’m going to promote it.’
“So, in the end she, sort of, offered me a the job of vice-chairman. I said to her, ‘I’m really happy to help but I need to ask you a few questions.’ So, I said, ‘What’s the workload here? What do you want me to do?’,” knowing full well what I had to do if I was going to do this role.
“She said, ‘Well, maybe, you know, a couple of days every fortnight.’ I said, ‘Yes, okay, fine. And tell me what you do?’ She said, ‘Well, I probably do two days a week. I don't really like travelling and I’m not madly into sport. I don’t really want to be schmoozing middle-aged guys in bars.’ So, she looked at me and she said, ‘So, what do you think?’ And I went, ‘We're going to lose. Barbara, this is full-time.’”
It was claimed that Cassani’s decision to step down in May 2004 and allow Coe to step up was always planned, but it coincided with a front page story I wrote for The Guardian about a Government analysis of the London 2012 which concluded it needed a change of leadership if it was to stand any chance of winning. The consultant from the rival bid that leaked me the report later admitted it was a bad decision as putting Coe in charge of London 2012 changed the whole dynamics of the race.
“I'm going to say something I've never really said before,” Coe told me. “I took the role on because, as. Londoner, I didn’t want to see London embarrassed. When I got offered the job, I thought, ‘I'll do whatever I can’ but my first instinct was, ‘I don't want to see London embarrassed.’ Because if London had ended up going out in the second round, with seven, eight, 10 votes, I don’t think we’d have ever opened the door again to another bid. Then we started making progress and I'm thinking, ‘Well, okay, we’re not going to go out in the first round here and the longer it went the more chance we have.’”
Among the first people that Coe went to visit to discuss his new role with was former IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was naturally working on behalf of Madrid. “I said, ‘Look, I've got this incredible opportunity.’ We had lunch together and he said, ‘That is the only thing they could do. That’s really good for London, that's really good for you. You’re not going to win. Madrid’s going to win.’”
Just as London was beginning to finally gather some momentum, the bid suffered another near fatal blow on the eve of the 2004 Olympics in Athens. A BBC Panaroma documentary filmed Bulgarian IOC member Ivan Slavkov talking openly with undercover reporters about the “favours” that could sway voting for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. The sting led to Slavkov being expelled from the IOC but behind the scenes there were warnings that further problems with the British media would be encountered if London was awarded the Games.
“A few IOC members were saying, ‘Jesus, do you really want seven years of these guys peering into every nook and cranny of your private life, the IOC?’” Coe admitted. “And my line was very carefully crafted, ‘Guys, where do you want to be? You get this right, it will be massive. I’m sorry, the world’s media centre is not in New York, it’s not in Paris, it’s certainly not in Moscow or Madrid.’”
The final IOC evaluation report published in June 2005 a month before the final vote still had Paris ahead but the fact that nothing more damning could be found in the 124-page report than a paragraph about the location of the disco in the Athletes’ Village showed how little serious criticism there was of London in it.
It was in those final few weeks when really London began to gain ground on Paris with its strong focus on legacy and regeneration and a compelling vision for youth engagement. Just like Coe used to do when he was a middle-distance runner, London passed the French capital down the home straight thanks to the impetus provided by Blair. Any suspicions at Downing Street about Coe’s rival political affiliation, which had included working for William Hague, the Leader of the Opposition, had by now been parked and the Government came fully on board supporting the bid.
By 2005, the Prime Minister’s popularity may have been beginning to dim at home but abroad he was still a celebrity. He flew to Singapore as a pivotal part of the London 2012 bid team but had to return late the day before the vote as Britain was hosting the G8 Summit at Gleneagles. He took on the mammoth task of talking to as many as the 100-plus International Olympic Committee members as he could before leaving.
“Blair, that day, went through 34 fifteen minute one-on-one meetings, with only me in the room,” revealed Coe. “If anybody was put on the planet to do that it was Tony Blair. And there were no great briefing documents, he would just look at me and he would want me, in 30 seconds, to explain who he was now meeting,”
Things nearly went wrong only once when three-time Olympic javelin gold medallist Jan Zelezny was bought into meet Blair instead of someone else. “He thought it was a winter sportsman and I remember saying, ‘Prime Minister, this is a very, very special member - he currently holds the world javelin record’. He looked at me thinking he was about to speak to a speed skater or something like that.”
Operating in tandem with Blair was his wife Cherie. She memorably rounded on French President Jacques Chirac at an official reception in Singapore over comments made about British cuisine. “Above the hubbub her voice rang loud and clear,” Coe laughed. “‘I gather you've been saying rude things about our food’, she said, at a volume that would have done justice to a packed courtroom. Her husband, who could hear as well as I could, had assiduously turned away.”
Blair himself was paranoid about being photographed with Chirac. “I had people dotted around the reception area, so I knew where we were going to the targeted people we wanted him to meet in the reception area, people that he hadn’t the one-on-ones with,” Coe said. “We would literally go from one to two, from two to three, and I explained to him the system and I said, ‘Just follow me’ and he went, ‘Yes, I know but I don't want to be in the photograph with Chirac’ and I went, ‘I know.’ And then every few moments he'd go, ‘I don't want to be photographed with Chirac’.
“I went, ‘I know how to do this. You seem to forget, I spent four years working for somebody who didn’t want to be in a photograph with you.’ I said, ‘I know the sensitivities here, believe me. I will get you out of here and I promise you will not be in a photograph with him.’ And we got him into a car and that was when he went back to the hotel, and he still had another four or five people to see that evening before he went. Blair was brilliant, and he very nearly missed his flight to the G8. He was being chased by his officials, ;You're going to miss this flight, you’re going to miss this flight.’ And he only just made it.”
Myself and colleague Adrian Warner, who was working for BBC London, managed to gatecrash that invitation-only reception. How we did it was a complete fluke. While we trying to work out where the private IOC members event was taking place we spotted Hillary Clinton leaving the opening ceremony for the Session which she had attended on behalf of the New York City bid and followed her.
I am not quite sure how we managed it, but myself and Adrian somehow found ourselves directly behind Clinton with her United States secret service security team leading the way and following at the back. I was sure that once we got into the lift, the security personnel would notice our media accreditations and ask us to leave. But they did not and when the doors opened it was on to a unique view of how the bid process worked. It was clear that while the London 2012 team were turbo-charged, their rivals Paris were much more relaxed, perhaps believing they already had the victory in the bag.
It is no coincidence that myself and Adrian were the only two journalists to correctly predict that London would win the next day. Coe has claimed that the row with Cherie Blair so embarrassed Chirac that he left the reception early and missed a crucial opportunity to lobby on behalf of Paris 2012.
On the day of the vote, Coe treated it like he used when he was competing at the Olympics, not trying to bid for them. The London 2012 bid team had arrived in Singapore to ensure everyone was recovered from jet-lag, scripts were written in plenty of time and the presentation was fully rehearsed. In the hours before he was due to lead London’s final pitch to the IOC, Coe ensured that he got himself into the zone and ignored what his rivals were doing.
This relaxed approach confused several members of Coe’s team, including chief executive Keith Mills and London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who both could not understand why he was not watching the presentations of the other cities. “I said, ‘Ken, when I was competing I didn’t go down to the warm-up area to watch the opposition warming up,’” Coe said. “So, I stayed in my room and I laid on my bed, doing exactly what I would do in the lead up to a competition, and I did exactly what I would always do and listen to jazz. I can tell you what I listened to, I listened to a solo piano by Jimmy Rowles, a lovely pianist I absolutely love. I can remember lying on my bed listening to that and then had room service.”
In his final speech, Coe drew upon memories of how the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City had inspired him to become a world-class athlete, telling the IOC that giving the Games to London would “inspire the athletes of tomorrow”.
He told them, “It is a critical decision about which bid offers the vision and sporting legacy but protects the Olympic Games. It is a decision about which city shows a generation why sport matters. That’s what drives me to do whatever we can to inspire young people to choose sport - whatever they do, whatever they believe and wherever they live. Choose London today, and you send a clear message to the youth of the world - the Olympic Games is for you.”
The speech was as brilliantly delivered as anything Coe produced on the running track. “I wrote it up 4 o’clock in the morning and wrote it by the side of a swimming pool,” he revealed. “I just woke up a few days before and then I went, ‘I know what I need to say’ and I went down, sat next to the pool in the dead of night with a fountain pen and wrote it.”
Voting was closely guarded secret until the worldwide television presentation was broadcast with the result being announced at 7.46pm Singapore-time. “I remember walking into the hall for the result and there was call from the Downing Street switchboard and it’s the Prime Minister,” revealed Coe. “’So, how's it gone?,’ he said. And I went, ‘We’re going in for the vote now’ and he went, ‘Yes, I know, but what’s the score? What’s the result?’
“I said, 'Prime Minister, I really genuinely can't tell you.’ He said, ‘But you must know,' I went, 'No, no, nobody knows.’ And I suddenly realised, of course, he’s got exit polls and he’s got the number crunchers who are telling him that he’s held Southend but we didn’t? So, by 10 o’clock Jonathan Dimbleby is saying, ‘I can now announce that it's a Labour landslide,’ you know? I said, ‘There are no exit polls here, I genuinely don’t know’ and I said, ‘If I go on talking to you they’re going to lock me out of the room, because they're going to close the room, I won't even be in there.’”
Rogge’s battle with the envelope only added to the tension before he managed to prise it open and pull out the piece of paper with “London” printed on it. “I remember Keith Mills saying to me, ‘Oh, all the photographers are sitting in front of Paris. There was a photographer in front of us, who was sitting in front and he photographed me winning at Moscow 1980 so he said, ‘Oh, I just thought I'd be there.’”
When IOC President Jacques Rogge read out the word “London”, Coe’s first instinct was not one of joy, but of relief. “I know when I’ve got across the line and you’ve either been successful or you’ve been unsuccessful, your first thought, my first emotion, is never about, ‘Oh, fantastic, I’ve won.’ My first emotion is always, if I’ve won, ‘Thank God I haven’t let the backroom team, family and friends down.’”
There was a postscript to Rogge’s difficulty opening that envelope. “I went to see him a few weeks later and brought him a silver letter opener from Sheffield,” Coe said. “I said, ‘No city ever deserves to be put through that again,’ so I said, ‘Please, take this as a gift.’ That letter opener actually now travels with the IOC for Sessions and when they make announcements.”
In the end, Coe believes the fact he was parachuted in at late notice to lead the bid and that being the underdog the whole race played into London’s hands and was the main reason they won by four votes. “There is no doubt, looking back, we had momentum and I sensed that momentum was growing in the continental visits we made,” he said. “I sensed the momentum was growing at the end. I also sensed that Paris became a little risk averse, they didn’t really want to say very much, we had nothing to lose so we kept pushing right up to the last minute.
“What we did well was setting the agenda so that everybody was talking about us. We would hit them with transport and everybody then came back with, ‘Well, we can do this,’ by which point you'd moved onto something else. So, they were always playing catch-up. We didn’t get everything right but I think we got more things right than we got wrong, and that's really the assessment. I look back and think having barely a year from taking the role to getting to the vote was a bit of blessing in disguise. I was able to drive stuff rather than thinking, ‘Well, we've got two years’.”
Coe may have taken on being the chairman of London 2012 initially with the aim of trying to avoid humiliation for his home city but he always realised better than almost anyone else what victory would mean. “Apart from not wanting London to be embarrassed, the other overwhelming motivation was I also knew that we had the ability to do things at a seven-year plan, and it would be a platform to do things that you would not be able to replicate,” he said.
“The regeneration East London would never have happened because there’d have always been an economic downturn, there would always be a reason why you didn’t want to spend any. You’d have abandoned and aborted everything in 2007. So, I couldn’t see in my lifetime a better vehicle to do everything that I believed sport could achieve.”
Celebrations did not last long, though, as the next morning in London a series of bombings in London killed 52 people and injured nearly 800. Livingstone had to rush home and the rest of the bid arrived back in Britain anonymously with no fuss. “It would have been nice to have come home with lovely photographs of the bid team coming down the steps of the plane and all that, but it was not possible,” said Coe.
Looking back on whether London 2012 delivered on its promise, Coe admitted that the aim of getting more children involved in sport failed and that was because politicians failed to capitalise on the opportunity. “We could have done more off the back of the Games,” he said. “But school sport became a political football.”
But Coe is unequivocal that London 2012 delivered when it comes to the regeneration of a part of the city neglected for decades. “The Olympic Park is anything but a white elephant,” he said. “You've got thousands of people every year going through the Park swimming and cycling. You have got the Copper Box. You've got more housing and you’ve got the largest retail development in Europe and you've got three universities in one. It's working. I still think it's the strongest legacy of any Olympics.
“I think for me it probably meant more to me than anything I’ve done. We built a new city inside an old city in seven years. Is anything I’ve ever done probably going to match that? I doubt it.”
Any amendments or additions please contact Duncan Mackay via the Substack App or email him at duncanmackayjournalist@gmail.com.