In Lausanne next week, the most powerful group of people in world sport congregate to award the rights to play host to the greatest celebration of world sports to one of five bidding cities.

At the best of times, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the 113 pampered members thereof has one foot in the world of sport and another foot in the world of politics. For five days next week they will be up to their armpits in politics. The deliberations and machinations will make for more compulsive viewing than many Olympic events.

Originally, 11 cities were in the running for the right to host the 2004 summer Olympic games. In the spring, after a preliminary round of surveys and inspections by an IOC evaluation committee, this was whittled down to five. Istanbul, Lille, St Petersburg, Seville, San Juan and Rio de Janeiro all fell by the wayside.

The surviving contenders increased the intensity of their canvassing, prostrating themselves ever more abjectly before the grandees of Olympism. As one disgruntled Australian said of the latter stages of the bidding process for the 2000 Games, which was held in the Hotel du Paris in Monte Carlo: "We went to the Brothel de Paris every morning and prostituted ourselves for the day." The Australians won. Imagine the scars the losers carried away.

If the principles are low, the stakes are high. The organising committee which wins will do well to make a modest profit out of the games, but the legacy in terms of infrastructure is huge, as is the shot of adrenalin which the games provide to any local economy.

With so much at stake it is little wonder that the world of bidding is rife with rumours of underhand deals and bribes. In recent months, domestic opposition to the Stockholm bid has escalated into a campaign of bombings and arson attacks. The response of the Swedish organising committee is typical of the fevered judgments which bidding cities make. They claim the bombings could be the work of a rival city and, no matter who's responsible for the attacks, they are the very reason for the IOC to award the games to Stockholm: anything else would be a capitulation.

Of course every city has a special reason for claiming favouritism. Athens is the home of the Olympics. Buenos Aires is the capital of one of the 12 founding nations of the Olympic movement. Cape Town is a city on the cusp of a harmonious new era and Africa has never been host to the games. Rome is the Eternal City, the only one of the five to host a post-second World War Olympiad.

Next week, though, sentiment will count for little. Hard dealing and plain lucre reaps the votes. The IOC has made some inroads to stopping the relentless junketeering which brought ignominy upon its house in previous bid campaigns, and members are barred from receiving lavish gifts or enjoying more than four nights worth of hospitality from bidding cities. Yet what transpires in Lausanne will owe more to the traditions of Tammany Hall than the ideals of Corinth.

Rome is the short-odds favourite to host the 2004 Olympics. Any other result would be a major upset. The animosity between Rome and Athens has been so pronounced that Stockholm, had they been spared an internal campaign of dissent involving bombings and arson attacks, might have stolen through the middle. The Swedish bid is technically the best, and there are no doubts about that nation's ability to deliver.

The Buenos Aires bid has impressed many with its plans for a 14-kilometre Olympic corridor winding along the banks of the River Plate. The Greeks were cruelly stitched up by commercial imperatives when Atlanta beat them out for the 1996 Games. The South Africans claim this moment in history as theirs and offer Table Mountain as backdrop. Rome, however, has what nobody else has. Rome has clout.

Next Friday each of the cities will have its final shot at persuading the voters. The cities will line up one after the other to give lavishly-produced, 55-minute presentations of their plans. There are no depths of sentimentality or hubris to which the bidding cities won't sink at this stage. Little children of all races are exploited readily. The video presentation of most bids makes Little House on the Prairie look like cold, gritty, urban reality.

The real business of the day, however, will be the report to the IOC by its evaluation commission, which takes place for an hour after the final city (Rome, in this instance) has made its presentation.

As soon as the evaluation committee has finished its business, the voting begins, and in 30, drama-filled minutes, campaigns which have spun on their own energy for years are blown away.

The city with the fewest votes in round one (likely to be Buenos Aires or Stockholm) is eliminated for round two, and so on until two cities are left.

This process is less straightforward than it looks. When Berlin was eliminated in the second round in the 1993 session, Manchester actually lost votes on the next round. Something similar happened to a respectable Melbourne bid for the 1996 games.

The political considerations which IOC members bring to the voting hall are many and varied. Up to a dozen European cities, including London, are considering bids for the 2008 games. If the 2004 games are awarded to Europe, the pressure to bring the games to Africa or Asia in 2008 will be immense. Many of the European voters will be looking to 2008 and hoping perhaps that the games go elsewhere.

This could be balanced out, however. Will the South American and Asian vote weigh in behind Cape Town, or will voters flock behind the Roman candidacy in the hope of taking the games to Beijing or Argentina in 2008?

If Cape Town can stay in the process long enough, can they draw votes from disgruntled supporters of the Athens bid who have found Rome's campaign (and especially the contribution of athletics) high handed and insulting?

The permutations are virtually endless. Rome are the favourites, but the business is fuzzy enough and complicated enough to be interesting right till the end.