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Ä°stanbul loses 2020 Olympics bid out to Tokyo in final round

07 September 2013 22:40 (UTC +04:00)

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.

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 then competed with Tokyo in a final head-to-head ballot.

The final winner was announced at 23:00 (Turkey time), when IOC President Jacques Rogge opened a sealed envelope following a second round of secret voting.

In initial comments on the voting, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan said the IOC decision “should be respected.”

Ä°stanbul 2020 would have been the first Olympics to be held in a predominantly Muslim country and the first to be staged across two continents simultaneously - Asia and Europe if it had won the bid.

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.

Turkey's Prime Minister ErdoÄŸan (R) receives a diploma from IOC President Jacques Rogge after the Ä°stanbul 2020 bid presentation during the International Olympic Committee session.

Leading the delegations were the prime ministers of all three countries. Shinzo Abe of Japan, Mariano Rajoy of Spain and Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan of Turkey all flew to Buenos Aires straight from the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The IOC report on Ä°stanbul earlier praised the government backing, wide public support and its capability to deliver construction for the Games on time with a massive projected infrastructure budget of $19.2 billion, including building legacy projects.

But the bid has been undermined by a series of blows in recent months. Anti-government protests have rocked Turkey, doping bans have been slapped on dozens of its athletes and turmoil in the Middle East is deepening with the prospect of a US-led military intervention against neighboring Syria.

This was the fifth time Ä°stanbul has been a candidate for the Olympic Games, whereas for Madrid it was the third consecutive time, and for Tokyo the second time in a row. Tokyo, which has already hosted the Olympics, in 1964, was said to have received the highest praise in the IOC report.

Ä°stanbul was pitching its case as an "historic choice" for the IOC: the first Olympics in the region, the first in a city linking two continents, the first in a predominantly Muslim nation.

"Ä°stanbul 2020 will be held against the backdrop of one of the most magical cities on the planet: A bridge between continents, cultures and generations for thousands of years," bid leader Hasan Arat said.