Women Helped Shape London Olympic Bid, Says Blair Memoir

(ATR) Tony Blair credits two women as the lynchpins in summoning his faith in the London Olympic bid – one of the revelations in his newly published memoir.

Bid chair Seb Coe, superstar ambassador David Beckham and former London mayor Ken Livingstone all get lip service and IOC President Jacques Rogge nary a mention in "A Journey".

But the former British PM gives Tessa Jowell – then secretary of state for culture, media and sport – and his wife Cherie credit for turning aside his doubts about the London bid.

"When the Olympics open in London in 2012, many people will be remembered as having brought them to Britain," Blair writes, "but it all started with Tessa Jowell."

He praises the former Olympics minister for challenging him to see the significance of a British bid and to embrace the associated risk.

Blair, after all, says he never thought his country would win, let alone finish second.

"Suppose we get beaten and, what's worse, we get beaten by the French and I end up humiliated?" Blair recalls telling Jowell.

She, for one, didn’t care.

"Everybody else was urging caution," she told Around the Rings.

"I just took a completely different view and thought that at the very least, the honorable thing to do and the brave thing to do was to try, and that if we didn’t win, then at least we would have tried."

In a chapter titled "Triumph and Tragedy," these revelations and more come neatly tucked amid the larger context of a G-8 summit and the London subway bombings, both of which fell during the same week as the 117th IOC session.

Roughly 10 of the book’s 682 pages chronicle Blair’s take on London 2012, including his lukewarm respect for IOC members, his frustration with bidding politics and his utter exhaustion of all things Olympic.

"I had had just about enough of the Olympic movement, its members and its ceremonies," he remembers feeling toward the end of his whirlwind stay in Singapore.

Blair writes that he personally lobbied 40 of the IOC’s 115 members from his hotel room couch but that much of the legwork had already been done.

"By the time we all converged in Singapore, [Cherie] had met, followed up and kept in touch with a large part of the committee," he says of his wife.

"At the IOC party we were continually bumping into her ‘old friends.’"

Blair writes of her knack for winning over lower-profile, less "important" IOC members whose votes, of course, counted the same as the rest.

"There are several people without whom we would not have won the bid, and she is one of them," Blair exudes.

Though he mentions most of the London 2012 team past and present, he rarely does so with that level of praise, suggesting those "several people" are in fact Jowell and his wife (and perhaps Coe).

Jowellconfirms Blair does not overstate Cherie’s level of influence in the bid nor the groundwork she did on its behalf.

"Cherie is a complete athletic nut," she said. "Not only does she love following athletics and watching athletics, but she knows an awful lot about athletics."

Missing from the book is any discussion of how Blair’s government responded to the bid’s success, what the Olympics will mean for England or whether he had dirt on any IOC members.

The closest he gets is a shady "understanding" Livingstone had with the Russian delegation in Singapore and a humorous retelling of how Coe saved him from mistaking an ice-skating champion turned IOC member for a javelin-throwing one.

On the whole, Blair keeps himself at arm’s length from the IOC, both in Singapore and throughout "Triumph & Tragedy." Itsmembers seem to befuddle him at times and inspire him at others.

"They were immensely sensitive to the charges that the whole thing had become commercialized and had lost touch with its inner self," he recalls thinking during the IOC’s assessment visit to London.

"They wanted the Olympics to mean something again, a higher and better thing, not just a great moneymaking celebrity fest."

Only two IOC members are mentioned by name, one of them – Britain’s own Craig "Tweedie" – incorrectly.

"Must have had something else on his mind," Reedie told ATR. "O forgive him."

"I haven’t spoken to Mr. Tweedie," Jowell joked, "but I can tell you he’ll never be Mr. Reedie again."

Perhaps the book’s most alarming revelation, at least from an Olympics point of view, is more an omission than anything else.

The Singapore storyline gets no real ending nor does the bid itself.

Blair gives readers the chapter’s greatest line when he describes his reaction to the IOC’s vote.

"I, of course, shot up like a rocketing pheasant on one of the nearby moors," he writes, referencing the topography of Gleneagles, Scotland, location of the UK-hosted G-8.

That euphoria is just as quickly subsumed by the summit’s geopolitical pressures and the shock of the 7-7 bombings.

A final reference to the Olympics comes toward the chapter’s end, but only in reference to the attack.

"It was the time to let the Olympic spirit flow, through the tragedy as well as the triumph," he says in explanation of the tribute he paid to Britain’s Muslim population during the tragedy’s aftermath.

London 2012 is neither a footnote nor a plot point along Blair’s "Journey," but he makes clear Tessa Jowell and his wife Cherie are in fact main characters.

Written by Matthew Grayson.