London will spend €39 million on its bid to stage the 2012 Olympic games, nearly double its nearest rival Paris and €24 million more than Madrid, yet the Spanish capital was ranked above London in the International Olympic Committee's (IOC's) recently-published technical report on the bids.
Research carried out by Sportcal.com found that London proposed to spend more (€14 million) in the so-called application phase - the period that ended in May with the publication of the report and the selection of a shortlist of five cities to proceed to a vote in July next year — than Madrid's budget for the entire bidding period (€13.5 million).
Madrid, with the smallest bidding budget of the five shortlisted cities came a very close second in the technical report's evaluation to Paris, whose bidding budget is €22 million.
Moscow and Paris will spend €20 million and €17.5 million, respectively. New York was fourth in the technical report evaluation, and Moscow was fifth.
Several sources at London 2012, the London bid organisers, pointed out that the city, which has never before bid to host the Olympics (but was last awarded the staging of the games in 1948), had to build its bid "from scratch."
They said that many of the necessary bidding structures were already in place for Paris, which is bidding for the third time in recent years to stage the games.
They also pointed out that New York was chosen as USA's Olympic bidding city only after an internal contest against several other US cities, giving its bid a head start over others, like London, that were beginning from a standing start.
However, this argument does not appear to explain the much smaller budgets of the other two candidate cities, especially that of Madrid, which last bid, unsuccessfully, to host the Olympics of 1972.