Paris puts the boot in over Olympic bid
London's 2012 Olympic bid rivals Paris faced a warning from the International Olympic Committee today after their bid leader launched an astonishingly ill-timed attack on Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone.
Bidding cities are not allowed to criticise their rivals under the strict rules of the IOC's ethics commission. But just hours after Livingstone was given the go-ahead to rejoin the Labour Party, Paris mayor and bid chief Bertrand Delanoe questioned the political solidarity behind London's bid.
He said: "I cannot help but notice that the French consensus, especially between Paris city authorities and the State, represented by the President of the Republic (Jacques Chirac), is stronger than that between the Mayor of London and the British Prime Minister."
Delanoe's criticism, which was published around the world by the French international news agency AFP, comes just a week before the 2012 race begins in earnest. Next Thursday the nine bidding cities will hand in their first paperwork on their Games plans to the IOC.
The following day London and Paris will go head-to-head in the public relations battle for the first time with glitzy bid launches.
London will reveal its plans at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden while Paris officials have chosen the first floor of the Eiffel Tower as the venue for their full launch.
Paris and London are regarded as the main front-runners and are set for a fierce campaign leading up to the vote in Singapore in July 2005.
Delanoe's comments are sure to face scrutiny from the ethics commission. The IOC even warned Blair last month over what was a relatively-minor issue of mentioning the London bid at the Commonwealth Summit in Nigeria. Ethics commission chief Paquerette Girard-Zappelli said today that she had not yet been informed of Delanoe's comments.
It would be a surprise if London bid leaders did not complain about them. Today, however, bid officials were keen not to criticise Paris in public and refused to comment on the attack. Anglo-French relations have been strained in the last year after Chirac's stance on the Iraq War. The 2012 campaign will also be viewed as a test of the world status of Blair and Chirac.
Chirac did not mention Blair or Livingstone but he praised Paris's staging of last August's World Athletics Championships.
He said: "Paris, an intellectual capital, a cultural capital, an economic metropolis, also proves year after year that it is one of the world capitals of sport."
The other cities bidding for the 2012 Games are Istanbul, Havana, Leipzig, Madrid, Moscow, New York and Rio de Janeiro.
