ABSTRACT

We will never know the true significance of French President Jacques Chirac’s widely reported casual denigration of Finnish cooking in securing the 2012 Summer Olympic Games for London instead of the longstanding favourite, Paris. According to a secretly recorded restaurant conversation with the German Chancellor and the Russian President in July 2005, he said of the London bid that, ‘[y]ou can’t trust people who cook as badly as that. After Finland, it’s the country with the worst food’ (Barkham, 2005a). The following day the story appeared in the French newspaper, Libération and was widely picked up by international news media. It was variously presented as a huge insult to British and Finnish cookery, a sign of French arrogance or, simply, a colossal error of judgement. Two days later the IOC met in Singapore to make its decision (Campbell, 2005). When successive rounds of voting had eliminated all other candidate cities, only Paris and London remained, with London winning by just four votes. Finland had two of these, so its delegates’ choices (which remain entirely anonymous, of course) could hypothetically have swung the result in London’s favour.