Reedie was part of the BOA team who attempted to secure the 2000 Olympics for Manchester. The failure \u2013 the second, following the unsuccessful bid for the 1996 Games \u2013 convinced Reedie that only a London bid could succeed, and with his powers of persuasion he got the prime minister, Tony Blair, and the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, on board for the 2012 campaign.<\/p>\n
For all Reedie\u2019s efforts, London was one of eight initial bidders, and on the shortlist of five Paris were clear favourites. But Reedie got to work \u2013 \u201cthe IOC like to give the Games to people they like so we went out of our way to be liked,\u201d he recalled \u2013 and when London and Paris went head-to-head in the final vote in 2005, his work paid off with a narrow victory.<\/p>\n
While his personal 2012 Olympics experience was packed with front-row highlights, he did have one regret. He was planning to watch the men\u2019s 100 metres final, in which Usain Bolt was the overwhelming favourite, but when a colleague was forced to drop out of a fencing medals ceremony at the ExCel Centre, he had to step in.<\/p>\n
He should still have had enough time to get to the Olympic Stadium in time for the start, but as he recalled, \u201cthere was a protest, and it went on and on. It became clear that I wasn\u2019t going to get back to the stadium in time. So we went back to the car but found that our television set had broken down. I think I was the only person in the world who didn\u2019t see the 100m final as it happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2000 he had joined the board of WADA, and in 2014 he became its president. A few months later, one of the biggest crises in the history of international sport broke when the scale of Russia\u2019s doping operation at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi became apparent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reedie was part of the BOA team who attempted to secure the 2000 Olympics for Manchester. The failure…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[26],"tags":[27,1050,3556,4781,4782,330,333,4780],"class_list":["post-9896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-london","tag-obituaries","tag-obituary","tag-seb-coe","tag-sport-obituaries","tag-standard","tag-us-content","tag-winter-olympics"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116371933267749842","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}