"Cursed button" and second vote, two keys in Olympic voting (Feature)

By Sebastian Fest Oct 1, 2009, 16:16 GMT

   Copenhagen - Over four years after a vote that Madrid lost by a very small margin in Singapore, the enigma of the 'cursed button' remained unsolved ahead of the key decision on the 2016 Games Friday in Copenhagen.

Back then, Israel's Alex Gilady, a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), said his Greek colleague Lambis Nikolau had pressed the wrong button in the third round of voting as he cast his electronic ballot.

   Nikolau allegedly wanted to vote for Madrid, but pressed the button for Paris. Instead of a 33-33 draw, the result was a 34-32 which allowed Paris to move on to the final, where it was eventually to lose to London by 54-50.

The BBC made the story public at the time, although Nikolau subsequently denied it.

   And yet, everything appears to indicate that it was true. Spain's Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr - who attended that election albeit without the right to vote - recalls what happened.

   'That was an accident that torments us, but what could we do?' says the son of the man who led the IOC with an iron hand for 21 years.

'It was a mistake, he is a good friend, and when the vote was already over he tried to fix it. He asked please, but he was told that the voting was already closed,' Samaranch Jr told the German Press Agency dpa four years later.

Since its 111st general assembly in Sydney in 2000 the IOC has been using an electronic voting system to choose Olympic hosts .

An IOC spokesman told the Danish website Play the Game that the system saves time.

'A manual round of voting and then counting of ballots took at least 30 minutes. Thus in a vote for the election of a host city with five finalists, you could have up to four rounds of vote, thus over two hours of time,' the spokesman was quoted as saying.

FIFA uses the same system but only for decisions, not for elections. The IOC vote is secret and nobody can know what city each member voted for, the Olympic organ says.

Mercedes Coghen, CEO of the Madrid 2016 bid, sees no danger.

'The system will work,' she told dpa.

Whether it will work for Madrid in its race with Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Chicago is quite another story, hence the huge luring mechanism that the city has deployed - like its rivals - over the past two-and-a-half years.

Candidate cities are hoping to just survive the first round of voting, which is the most dangerous round, the round in which anything can happen.

And that is where the 'second vote' comes in, the preference of IOC members whose favourite city is out of the race.

'The second vote is crucial, that is what we are all going for,' a high official of the Rio bid told dpa.

And if there ever was a city that conquered that 'second vote,' it was London four years ago, to surprise Paris in the race for the 2012 Olympics.

'Tony Blair met with me for 45 minutes in Singapore. We talked about everything, about our countries, about history, he told me which had been his most difficult decisions as Prime Minister and how he had made them,' one member of the IOC executive committee told dpa.

'We almost didn't mention the Games. I had decided to vote for Paris if Madrid lost. But when the moment came I told myself, 'look, I'm going to vote for London.' And London won by four votes.'