Coe backs British passion to secure 2012 bid

An Olympics with packed stadia and enthusiastic, welcoming fans will be the image London hopes to impress on Games inspectors when they start evaluating the capital's 2012 bid today. Interview by Kate Holton

London bid leader Sebastian Coe will show a 13-strong Olympic evaluation commission around London for four days on the second stop of their five-city tour.

The former Olympic champion's task is to convince the inspectors London has the desire and the ability to host the world's greatest and largest sporting competition.

"What is the best demonstration that a country understands what the Olympic Games are about?" Coe asked Reuters in an interview.

"The best demonstration is a country that sends 20,000 people to Athens to watch. Raw polling data is pretty meaningless.

"We are able to demonstrate that 500,000 people pass through the gates of Wimbledon lawn tennis championships and, more broadly, that 25 million people go through football gates every year."

The evaluation team, which started in Madrid, will next travel to New York, then Paris before finishing in Moscow in mid-March. The IOC will announce the winning city in Singapore on July 6.

London has spent much of its campaign to host the Games behind recognised front runner Paris, which already has a stadium in place and, as demonstrated at the 1998 soccer World Cup, the experience to host major events.

London's position as second favourite is partly due to its high-profile bid leader Coe, twice the Olympic 1,500 metres champion and now a council member on the world governing athletics body.

However, Coe's job will not be easy. An early IOC report referred to the capital's transport system as "often obsolete" and surveys showed Londoners to be less enthusiastic than their Parisian counterparts in supporting the bid.

The damage caused by the Picketts Lock affair - when London won the right to host the 2005 world athletics championships only to give it back because of funding difficulties - could still linger in IOC minds.

This week is an opportunity for Coe and Tessa Jowell, the UK minister for culture, media and sport, to regain momentum and show the Olympic team what London can offer.

"All of us who are close to the bid know we can win," Jowell told Reuters in an interview.

"What we've got to do is to make crystal clear to the IOC just how much we want to host the Games, our passion about hosting the Games and the welcome that the IOC would find if they brought the Games to London."

Coe argues that London's transport problems have been dealt with and that a Games in the capital would be one of the best connected ever with the completed channel tunnel line linking the Olympic Park in the east of the city to central London.

He says London, where more than 300 languages are spoken, would welcome spectators and fans from around the world.

"I'm hazarding a guess that, within all those languages, sport is spoken of the most and we have the ability to create a sporting legacy that I don't think can be equalled in another city," he added.

"We can guarantee that there will never be a question about having empty seats in any British venue for an Olympic Games."

Coe told Reuters the bid race was too close to call but was encouraged by the fact that, since Barcelona won the right to host the 1992 Summer Games, the favourites have finished first only once in the final round of voting by IOC members.

In 2001, front runner Beijing won the bid decisively.