The grubby business of Olympic bidding

Tom Humphries LockerRoomSaturday night at the track in Madrid. Frightening, really. For a start, Merlene Ottey is still doing the rounds. Merlene Ottey of Slovenia, as she is now. She dawdles on the tartan, trying to milk the applause from an audience many of whom weren't born when she competed in the Moscow Olympics 24 years ago.

Since then she's seen them all down. Flo-Jo. Torrance. Krabbe. Jones. Kelli-White. The lot. And, at 43, with her reputation slightly drug-tainted and her muscles a little less twitchy, she's still rolling on. Miss Havisham, alone, in the cobwebbed house of sprinting.

It was sad to see her, really, mustering what regal poise she still possesses, waving demurely with a look that said, I used to be somebody. A sudden urge came over this column to run down to the mixed zone, there to slap Merlene sharply on the cheek while shrieking, Why? Why? Why?

She's seen them all down, and when she thinks of them, all her rivals and opponents, she can hardly avoid noticing the thread of pharmaceutical abuse which runs through so many of the storylines. Here she was, in Madrid, while across the Atlantic in Sacramento the world's great sprinting power plays out the farce of its Olympic trials.

A quarter of a century at the top of such a steaming pile. A woman with such cheekbones as Merlene's owes herself better.

Madrid welcomed her though. Madrid is a candidate city for the 2012 Olympic Games and is therefore in the business of officially welcoming everybody. That was frightening, too. You travel to any credible bid city and see what they have to offer and your sleep is made unbearable by images of Gay Mitchell trying to flog the Dublin Olympics.

Olympic bidding is as grubby a business as top-level sprinting, and, looking at the well-lit little reception area under the main stand of the Estadio de Madrid, this column was again seized by the urge to breach the security, there to slap the suits sharply across the head and shriek, Why? Why? Why? The heat gets to this column.

Anyway, the question is valid. Apart from permitting the big boys to make out like bandits, what is the point of playing host to the Olympics anymore? Is there a point? I'm sure somewhere over the years Gay Mitchell has mentioned what the point would be, but I missed it.

In Athens next month, what percentage of the action will you accept as authentic? Which of the many freakish and novel endeavours on show will you take an abiding interest in? With a few exceptions, the nobility has gone from the Games.

Some of the best fun to be had out of Olympic-watching is this process of cities bidding against one another. It's like mud wrestling, only with less dignity attached.

There's no telling a candidate city that, though. You look into their eyes and they have those dollar signs which you normally see displayed on the pupils of cartoon figures who figure that they are about to get rich. Why, you say.

Yeeeharrrr! they reply.

Madrid, surprisingly, I think, for a city with no decent body of water to its name, is coming second in the race to host the 2012 Games, or the Games of 2M12, as the Spaniards call their date with destiny.

Call me an old sea dog, but I'm not at ease in any city without water, and Madrid's puny little river was once praised by Alexander Dumas for at least being navigable by horse and carriage. Still, they have the most splendid fountains, massive, plaza-filling extravaganzas which bear no relation whatsoever to the stingy old Floozie in the Jacuzzi thing we used to have in O'Connell Street.

The first major evaluation of candidate cities took place earlier this year and four cities (Rio de Janeiro, Havana, Leipzig and Istanbul) were eliminated. Five remained. Well, four-and-a-half really. Moscow was left in the race but is clearly struggling, trailing in a poor fifth behind Paris, Madrid, London and New York.

Reading through the IOC's assessments of the five surviving cities should be enough to end all that lingering, greed-fuelled talk about Dublin ever hosting the big gig. It won't end it, of course, but it should. There's nothing more appealing for a politician than to stand up on his wee biscuit tin and announce that he thinks his city is as good as any in the whole wide wurreld and we should be very proud blah, blah, blah.

But just look at New York. Poor sods. When they registered their bid back in 2002 they were under the impression that they would almost automatically be given the Games. Now they find themselves lagging in fourth place behind the Euroweenies.

Despite an Olympic budget of $3.7 billion (that's not including a planned $1.8-billion stadium on Manhattan's West Side), they have shipped heavy criticism for their infrastructural proposals, their transport system, their security. The Big Apple transport plans included a new subway line, but fatally omitted a Red Cow roundabout and a tinny little Luas system.

London is doing not much better. Rapped on the knuckles for not having a better transport system, better sports facilities, more experience or more acceptable plans for an Olympic village, they have kept a stiff upper lip despite suspicions that Tony Blair isn't half as keen on hosting the Games as he was on going to war with Iraq. The Brits reckon that their infrastructural costs will be £15 billion, a figure which includes building a cross-London rail link. £15 billion for London to get in shape? That's a hell of a lot of thank you notes to JP McManus.

And London, with Wimbledon, the new Wembley, Henley, Earls Court, etc, etc, not having sufficient experience of big events? Lawdee! The IOC should come to Parnell Park some night when there's club hurling on. No linesmen. No programmes. No order. That would make them see London in a better light.

Madrid is well placed and its latest bid magazine shows the city in all manner of suggestive poses. Languidly hosting not just international athletics, but large, international events in swimming, biking, fencing and badminton. Apart from its soccer tradition, the city also has a major interest in professional basketball, and hockey is popular. These may seem like obscure points, but they are the things which bring many of the 122 IOC voters into regular contact with Madrid and its bidders.

Like the other four surviving cities, Madrid has something else going for it: it is large and monumental, filled with squares and avenues and plazas and parks. The Games belong in places like this, not all choked up in a town like our beloved little dumpy Dublin.

You can imagine Madrid or Paris or any of the surviving bids mustering 65,000 volunteers, hosting 11,000 athletes, the same number of officials and twice as many journalists. You can visualise a security force of 14,000, an airport dealing comfortably with a year's worth of passengers coming through in the space of three weeks. And you can see the magnificent backdrops demanded by NBC television who run the Olympics between commercials on American television.

Another thing. During the summer, on most days you can see blue skies and a flaming yellow object known locally as "the sun".

Paris, of course, has all these qualities in abundance and its position as early favourite is well-merited. The city bid for the Games of 1992, which went to Barcelona, and bid again for the Beijing Games of 2008. The French know their way around the lobby rooms, they staged the last athletics World Championships, a recent World Cup and two previous Olympics, and they score highly in terms of global sexiness and, uhm, savoir faire.

The Olympics are somebody else's gig. They should be left like that. The Madrid documentation reveals something surprising: Dublin bid for the Games twice in the past, for 1932 and 1936. Bid twice, overlooked twice. They didn't buy our legendary insincerity. Phew! Jesse Owens doesn't know how lucky he was.

The Games revolve around the making of a quick mega buck. Apart from the hideous size of the affair, that quick-buck thing just isn't in our nature, is it?

Well, whatever. We owe ourselves better.