ABSTRACT
On 6 July 2005, on a humid night in Singapore, the IOC was about to announce the result of a two-year battle between candidate cities to stage the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It was 7.46 p.m., and just after midday in London. The envelope was opened, and IOC President Jacques Rogge announced the winner. In the final round of voting, London had beaten Paris by 54 votes to 50. For much of the long race Paris had been a strong favourite, with the book-makers’ odds favouring Paris right to the end, but the IOC had voted, and now London was to stage the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. How this came to pass has been subject to much scrutiny since, but one insider, the director of communications for the London 2012 bid, Mike Lee, considered that a defining feature of Sebastian Coe’s speech in Singapore was that its narrative was ‘more about the Olympic movement than about London’ (Lee, 2006, p. 183). By stressing both the importance of ‘legacy’, a discursively polysemic notion that emerged in IOC circles following the onslaught against its integrity in the 1990s about a set of (largely vague) benefits left behind after the sports mega-event has ended, and the potential role of London as a global media centre to help ‘the IOC transmit the call for more young people to take up sport’ (Lee, 2006, p. 183), the London bid team were able to win over the required number of dele-gates with a script in which ‘London’, ‘Englishness / Britishness’, ‘sport’, ‘the world’ and the future of ‘Olympism’ could be brought together.
