With all the terrible news coming out of Britain, I feel the need to put forth a more positive topic - specifically that London will be hosting the 2012 Olympics. This was announced yesterday. What is the general sentiment among Britons? In the U.S., everyone likes when we host an Olympics with the caveat being that we like it so long as the host city is not the city we happen to be living in. There are always transportation issues for the city in question, and simply getting to work is a trying experience if you live in the host city.

Here's my more important question though - do you think that Chirac's comments regarding England having bad food, and their only contribution to European agriculture being Mad Cow Disease had a negative effect on Paris winning the Olympic bid? Paris was considered the favorite, so was this bad luck, or really bad judgement on the part of Chirac?

About three quarters of the people I've talked to who live in London have real reservations about it. (It's apparently going to cost London taxpayers near to £600m over the next so many years, so draw your own conclusions about what their immediate reaction is.)

Being a Northerner, I'm personally ambivalent; it just seems like another glorified and probably half-arsed London-enrichment project to me.

I'm not sure whether Chirac's remarks had any effect, although I'd like to think they did.

The Brit's kicked the Frogs asses again.... The french got complacent and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Interestingly I have seen it reported that the two voting representatives from Finland both voted for Britain (Chirac claimed that only Finland's cuisine was worse than Britain's) although the report freely admitted that it had no reason to believe that they wouldn't have voted for Britain anyway.

Personally, I am glad that Toronto's Olympic bids failed - my family was living in Montreal back when they had the Olympics and it was a real nightmare for traffic etc.

There's a thread about the olympics in Whatnots, so please only center on the political aspect of the 2012 olympics here, and post the rest in Whatnots at http://www.sorcerers.net/ubb/ultimatebb.php?/topic/22/711.html