Voting ring patterns

With London having officially annouced its bid for the 2012 Olympics, you might find the Games Bids site a useful site to keep an eye on to keep up with news and predictions about the bidding process.

One part of it is that is quite interesting is the archive, with details of all the votes that determined the location of the previous Olympics. There's some interesting bits of alternate history when you see the cities that lost out in the bidding process - 1936 could have been in Barcelona, not Berlin, in 1956 Melbourne only won the first Southern Hemisphere games by one vote from Buenos Aires; and Detroit bid for every Games from 1952 to 1972, but never got more than 14 votes.