Big fight night in Lausanne. Tennis idol, Gabriela Sabatini, stands in the car-park sipping her bottled water. At this stage Buenos Aires needs her. Stefan Edberg, Wimbledon champion and now Olympic ambassador, mills around the lobby. A hand-shaker, a smiler - what a transformation. The Stockholm bidders seem content that his name is big enough.

Olympic sprinter Frankie Fredericks moves around the Palais de Bauleiu evangelising for Cape Town. After all the bickering between Stockholm, Athens and Rome, the Namibian sprinter's message is simple: United Africa, divided Europe.

Yesterday, President Nelson Mandela arrived to put his shoulder to the South African wheel. Think of Mandela's face and the Olympic torch flickering in a Cape Town backdrop, or Soweto or Robin Island united with the five Olympic rings. For an organisation consumed with symbolism, South Africa's potential to provide powerful imagery will not be lost to the 110 members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) today.

That said, it has been noted that NBC, who paid close to $1 billion for the television rights to the games and whose influence is immense, like the backdrop of Rome. So much for world unity.

There is talk, too, of Luciano Pavarotti arriving in to add glamour to the Rome bid, and talk too of Greek odesseys and Roman tragedies. Big fight night in the heavyweight division and we are drowning in such hyperbole.

This evening it will be decided amidst all of the opulence and ceremony that the IOC, a collection of mostly middle class and wealthy, white males, can muster and the frantic scramble for the 2004 Olympic games will end.

The interest in the event was such that 11 national Olympic committees nominated candidate cities. In view of the number involved, the IOC selected five to go into today's head-to-head. Istanbul, Lille, Rio de Janeiro, San Juan, Seville and St Petersburg fell by the wayside.

The IOC's determination to ensure a wide choice of bidding cities has, as always, been clinically conceived. It maintains their tight hold on the Olympic spectacle.

There were six cities competing for the games of 1992 (Barcelona) and 1996 (Atlanta) and five for 2000 (Sydney), but there had been only two cities bidding in 1988 (Seoul), and for Los Angeles in 1984 no other city was actively involved.

Such a paucity of candidates shifts the balance of power between the IOC and the host city. A more competitive bidding war ensures that the hopeful cities will remain suitably obsequious and comply with every IOC whim, a dubious quality much in evidence this week.

The favourite city going into the final round is Rome. The open campaigning of International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) president Primo Nebiolo suggests that the rotund Italian lawyer with a penchant for controversy has been working furiously in the background.

It has often been said of the IOC president, Juan Samaranch, that he surrounds himself with a "Latin Mafia". The names most frequently associated with him are Joao Havelange, IOC member and FIFA president; Mario Vasquez Rana, a Mexican newspaper millionaire, and Nebiolo. Members have come and gone and learned never to underestimate the IAAF president's bootboy image.

By 5.30 p.m. today the extent of Nebiolo's clout will be widely known after the votes are counted and the successful city finally signs the contract, one that will run into 53 pages and contains five additional volumes of guides of between 50 and 60 pages each.

A number of factors will come into play as members shift and change their position as candidates drop out of contention, among them deals, personal dislikes for a city, petty rivalries and politics. It has been said that Sydney benefited in that final voting sequence from Beijing's dubious past in the area of human rights.

The fear for the European cities is that if they do not succeed this time round, it could be a long time before the Olympic circus again comes into a European sphere. As the games were also hosted by Barcelona in 1992, the tendency would be to move on to another continent as befits a global organisation. Athens is thought to have missed their opportunity last time around when arrogance determined that they make their final delivery in Greek, not English or French, the chosen languages of the IOC.

The Buenos Aires and Cape Town bids may well be seen as dry runs for future attempts if they fail this evening. The pressure to grant Africa an opportunity to stage an Olympics in the near future is certain to increase. If that happens, the estimated $25 million it costs to make a realistic bid will have been worthwhile.

Juan Antonio Samaranch was yesterday re-elected as president of the International Olympic Committee until 2001. Also, for the first time in the history of the Olympic movement, a women has been elected as vice-president. She is Anita Defrantz from the US.