Baku-APA. Madrid was eliminated in the first round of voting to decide the host of the 2020 summer Olympic Games, leaving Tokyo and Ä°stanbul to battle it out in a final round of voting, APA reports quoting today’s zaman.
Madrid initially tied with Ä°stanbul as an also-ran in the voting by the International Olympic Committee. Ä°stanbul won the tiebreak vote 49-45. Ä°stanbul will now compete with Tokyo in a final head-to-head ballot.
The winner is due to be announced at 1700 local time in Argentina (23:00 Turkey time), when IOC President Jacques Rogge will open a sealed envelope following a second round of secret voting.
Ä°stanbul, Madrid and Tokyo made 45-minute presentations Saturday morning ahead of the vote later in the day by the International Olympic Committee. Ä°stanbul, making its fifth overall bid, was up first. The Turkish delegation pressed its case to take the Olympics for the first time to a predominantly Muslim country, to a city linking the two continents of Europe and Asia. With the civil war in neighboring Syria posing a major issue for the Ä°stanbul bid, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan said taking the games to Turkey "will send a very meaningful and strong message, not only to the world, but to our broader region." "At this critical moment, we would like to send a strong message of peace to the whole world from Ä°stanbul," ErdoÄŸan said. After the formal presentation, IOC member Prince Albert of Monaco asked what hosting the games in Turkey would mean to the wider region. "We believe that hosting the Olympics in Ä°stanbul will give this signal, this spirit of friendship and sharing and peace," ErdoÄŸan said. "And our country is a place where there is a lot of unity and diversity and that is the idea that we can share on a broader scale with the Olympic Games being hosted in Turkey."
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