Eight years on, Bob Scott, leader of the Manchester bid, predicted 20 votes in the first round. “I am happy to be here,” he declared, “and I hope to come again, many, many times – maybe also in the year 2000!” Tell you what, cobber, play your cards right and you could be in there.And so to the reckoning. When I am travelling and I find rain in a country, I always think it is a lucky country.” Oooh. Bet you say that to all the bids.In Sydney, he was pictured with schoolchildren sporting Aboriginal decorations and costume.

In Manchester, holding hands with children from a Sale infant school, he was cheered by children waving Union Jacks. Asked whether the rain which had fallen on that day would have a dampening effect on the city’s chances, he replied: “We are used to rain. No one was saying.All week, individual IOC members were canvassed discreetly in hotel bars and lobbies, indicating preferences, possibilities and even, in some cases, firm commitments.But the nature of the exercise – secret voting, with the least successful city dropping out round-by-round – meant that their true intentions seemed, to adapt Winston Churchill’s phrase about Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.In the preceding months, Samaranch had trailed the IOC’s availability teasingly around the block. But the IOC president, Juan-Antonio Samaranch, was said to favour the Chinese because the prospect of opening up new sporting links with their regime was the kind of thing a committee – say the Nobel Peace Prize committee – might look upon favourably.On the day before the election, 90 white roses, one for each IOC member, were delivered to the Hotel de Paris by the International Campaign for Tibet. A message was attached to each one: “Remember the political prisoners” Would IOC members do any such thing? Hard to tell.

But that had apparently been followed by a sense among some IOC members that the Sydney bidders had become cocksure, which had adversely affected their prospects…Peking’s bid was fronted by Chen Xitong, who as mayor of the city had ordered troops to open fire on protesting students in Tiananmen Square four years earlier Bit of a public relations hitch there, you might think. Theory and counter- theory travelled around the stuffy room for a long, barmy week as the five basic tools of the trade – who, what, why, where, when – were rendered ineffectual.Sydney, we were told, had the best technical bid – “bloody near perfect” one IOC member had claimed. Meanwhile, the two heavyweight contenders, Sydney and Peking, were working to each other’s body.Beyond those basic facts, for the increasingly frantic members of the Fourth Estate, there was little to catch hold of but swirls of rumour, fleeting impressions, non-attributable intimations. The General Election, apparently, was about to be won by the Liberal Democrats. The task upon which we were all engaged, closeted in our Monte Carlo conference room, was that of predicting to which city the International Olympic Committee – closeted in the luxuriant Hotel de Paris – would award the 2000 Games.
Of the five prospective hosts who had gathered for this quadrennial utterance of the Olympic oracle, Istanbul and Berlin had not even a faint hope of attracting a significant proportion of the 89 available IOC votes.Manchester, back again after the dismal failure of their bid for the 1996 Games, had come up with an ingenious projection of round-by-round voting which ended with them victorious. THERE COMES a point in most people’s lives when they stop and ask themselves: Who am I? What am I doing? Why am I here? For me, that moment came during September 1993 as I sat in a stuffy, viewless room with approximately 50 fellow journalists who, for all I knew, were experiencing the same feelings of angst and displacement At least they did if they had any sense.

Perhaps a victory over the team that caused him such trauma six years ago will finally allow Dan Reeves’ wounds to heal.. In a real sense however, his heart has been laid bare in more ways than one in recent weeks. “But that will never happen because somewhere along the line, you find somebody who’s not telling the truth.”Since airing his grievances earlier this week under the intense scrutiny of 3,500 media representatives assembled in Miami for the game, Reeves has apologised for his words, the apology being accepted by Shanahan. “You’d have to get us in a room with a psychiatrist and make us talk about what happened,” he said. We had a hell of a lot more good times when he was here than bad times.”Can the feud be resolved? Not according to Reeves. “I thought we were both going to take the high road on this and I don’t really understand it,” he said.Elway, appearing for what may be the last game of a glittering 16 year career is maintaining diplomatic dignity through it all “That was six years ago,” he said “I’ve moved on, and I concentrate on the good times.

“But am I a person that’s not going to speak to Mike Shanahan or John Elway? I don’t live my life like that, but I won’t go out to eat with them or go socially to a function.”A surprised Shanahan says his relationship with his former boss is beyond repair, and denies accusations of undermining his previous employer’s authority. Reeves has rightly been named coach of the year for the achievement, his reputation restored beyond debate.At times this week, however, his feud with Shanahan and Elway has threatened to overshadow the occasion His resentment has not dimmed with the years “You never forget those things,” said Reeves. The Falcons have lost just four times in 26 outings: 60-1 underdogs at the start of the campaign, they are without doubt the most surprising team in Super Bowl history. The Falcons, one of the league’s most consistent losers, had won just three games the year before and the enormity of the task was evident as they won just once in Reeves’ first eight games.Since then, the turnaround has been dramatic.