Tokyo Wins Vote To Host Summer Olympics In 2020 Beating Istanbul And Madrid

Tokyo has been chosen by the International Olympic Committee to host the 2020 Summer Games. Candidate city Madrid was ruled out in the first round of voting and Istanbul lost out in the final round. Delegations from Turkey, Japan and Spain met with the IOC in Buenos Aires earlier on Saturday for the highly-anticipated vote. Politicians, royalty, athletes and other celebrities represented their respective countries.

In selecting Tokyo, IOC officials ended a recent trend that had favored holding the Olympics in cities or regions that haven't previously hosted the games. Tokyo hosted the Olympics in 1964; the Winter Games were held in Nagano in 1998. But Tokyo officials also promoted their city's bid as symbolizing a new chapter for Japan, which is still recuperating from the tsunami and earthquake that devastated swaths of the country in 2011. Organizers have said they plan to have Olympic torchbearers hit by the tsunami.

The final announcement came as a striking turnabout for the Turkish delegation, which had earlier believed it had won not just the run-off vote but the competition itself. Each nation vying for the honored task of hosting the international games had the additional task this year of downplaying its own crisis, sometimes even spinning a crisis into a reason for awarding it the position, but the war in neighboring Syria complicated Turkey's bid for hosting the 2020 Olympics. The armed conflict has driven over two million Syrian refugees into neighboring countries, including Turkey, and has claimed the lives of over 100,000 people.

"You're in safe pair of hands with Tokyo" was the point the Japanese bid emphasized, actually using the words "safe pair of hands." They referred to a $4.5 billion reserve fund already in place to cover Olympic cost contingencies and polls showing travelers think Tokyo is the safest city in the world.

With Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, making a seemingly impossible guarantee that there would be no more present or future health-related problems related to radioactive water at the Fukushima nuclear plant 150 miles away, Tokyo addressed the one hot-button issue surrounding its bid. Abe made reference to Fukushima in his prepared remarks and unflinchingly answered IOC members' further questions about it. "Let me assure you, the situation is under control,'' Abe said. "It has never done and will never do any damage to Tokyo.''