Australian Bill Sweetenham explains why he bans British swimmers from wearing bodysuits outside competition.. The hardest bit will be the victory salute at the end. Crippled boxer Michael Watson on his brave bid to run the London Marathon.. Reports of the early demise of London’s proposed bid for the Olympic Games are greatly exaggerated. According to the man charged with convincing the Prime Minister of the desirability and viability of trying to bring sport’s most prestigious happening to the capital in 10 years’ time, the race is not only still on, but eminently winnable. “We know a couple of Cabinet ministers are sceptical but I’ll be surprised if the Prime Minister has even looked at it yet He’s had far too much on his plate. But when he does I think he will find the case a compelling one.”The BOA chairman says he senses that national goodwill towards a Games bid is overwhelming. “I cannot remember a sports project within the last few years that has gained such universal support.

The whole of sport is in favour, so is the business world, and all the political parties have backed it, including the Scottish National Party, for God’s sake.”This is the kind of alliance that sport has never been able to put together before. The only people who have not yet said they are in favour are the Government, and in my view that is quite right at the moment because they have to sign the guarantees implicit in the host-city contract which says that if the figures are wrong, they pick up the tab. They want to know what they are signing up to is deliverable, and I think we can convince them it is.”But I will say this. If the Government are not totally and absolutely committed to the bid – 110 per cent behind it – then there is no point in going on. Without that support we certainly would not bid because we would have no chance, and that would be a tragedy for sport in this country.”When the 61-year-old Reedie visits Downing Street later this month he will be welcomed as Britain’s most astute and experienced sports politician. A member of the International Olympic Committee since 1994, he is well placed in the movement’s corridors of power and has the ear of the new IOC president, Jacques Rogge.

Blair is far more likely too listen to him than to Ken Livingstone, Sebastian Coe, the Daily Telegraph or a host of other sports leaders and spin-meisters.It is also significant that, at her request, he is taking Secretary of State Tessa Jowell to have a final consultation with Rogge in Lausanne during what will be a critical month of negotiation. “Despite the independence of the Arup Report [which projected a cost of £2bn for the Games], the Government are still nervous that the methodology used was not sufficiently robust,” says Reedie. “They want to revisit the figures, because they still remember the Dome, they still remember Wembley and they still remember Picketts Lock They do not want that to happen again. We are co-operating with them to get one set of figures rather than them saying one thing and us saying something else, which is not productive at all.”The Government always seem to talk about costs and never about benefits. The regeneration contribution to East London would be immense. But I feel that what troubles the Government most is the question of winnability.

In a way they want something we cannot deliver – the guarantee that if we bid, we will win. I think the Prime Minister still feels burned by the outcome of football’s 2006 World Cup bid, yet most people must have known England weren’t going to win; I certainly did. I sat next to Lennart Johansson [the Uefa president] at a dinner beforehand and he told me, ‘Craig, there was a deal and they are going back on it’ You can understand why there was no sympathy for England. I can assure you that in the Olympic situation, there are no deals.”But the fact we have found it difficult to put plans in place for a new football stadium at Wembley doesn’t greatly bother the members of the IOC. The fact that we turned down the World Athletics Championships is more of a problem. But few people know that, to his credit, the Prime Minister tackled that head-on when he sat next to Lamine Diack, the president of the IAAF, at the opening of the Commonwealth Games It was an impressive performance. He spoke to him for some time in fluent French, apologising for the mess and stressing that bridges have to be rebuilt.”At the end of their conversation, I am pretty convinced that Lamine felt that a hugely successful Olympic Games in London would be no bad thing from the IAAF’s point of view.