London edges out Paris for the 2012 Olympics. This apparently came as a shock to the French:

Paris had been the front-runner throughout the campaign, but London picked up momentum in the late stages with strong support from Prime Minister Tony Blair.

One blogger, noting that two of the Olympic Committee voters were Finnish, speculates that outrage over the French President’s recent comments may have tipped the scales away from Paris towards London. Right before the Olympic Committee voting took place, Jacques Chirac offended both the British and the Finns by declaring their food terrible and that their poor culinary skills were grounds to distrust them as people.

As a New Yorker, I must say I’m relieved that the Olympics won’t be coming to my home town. To me, the Olympics seems like an endless parade of fringe sports that nobody cares about until the hype machine kicks into high gear every few years. Then all of a sudden, we’re obsessed for a few weeks with various sports so contrived that they could only have been invented by people trying—and failing—to prove that all the good sports hadn’t yet been created. But don’t listen to me, I’m just an old grouch trapped in a young person’s body who is happy that years of Olympic construction won’t be tying up traffic in a city already known as the gridlock capital of the world.