The Observer is particularly upbeat this morning:

London has in effect abandoned hope of winning the 2012 Olympic Games, because it is so far behind Paris, key members of the bidding team have told The Observer.

Did anyone ever think that we had a chance of seeing the Olympic Games in London? It was never terribly likely, and I’m not sure that the bid had a great deal of public support anyway, particularly from those who live further north than Coventry, since it just seemed like (yet again) vast amounts of money would be spent on an event in London, while the rest of the country would be pretty much left out.

I realise that the idea was to ship some of the stadia around the country after the event, and that the bid was supposed to reflect benefits for the whole country, but people are never going to see that in a London-centric event. The whole country got behind the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in a way that could never happen with a London-based sporting event.

Of course, if all of this speculation is wrong and Mike Lee (London 2012’s director of communications) is right, then I could end up looking very silly:

Not only is this an open race with everything to play for, but there are also five months to go before the vote. The mood is upbeat and confident. We have received extremely positive feedback on our proposals, and on the details of our candidate file, which we submitted in November.

I’m fairly sure that we won’t win. But I am willing to be proved wrong.