Tennis player Çağla Büyükakçay and Ali Babacan (pictured top), Turkey's fresh-faced Deputy Prime Minister for economic and financial affairs, were given prominent roles in a presentation that kicked off the day's events in this elegant Olympic city on the shores of Lake Geneva.

The contribution by Babacan to the behind-closed-doors presentation to 86 IOC members was particularly well-received, although one veteran observer of many bid campaigns felt that the team needed more "fire".

Overall, the consensus was that Istanbul had come back fighting from its recent setbacks, while succeeding in underlining the spectacular setting that constitutes one of the bid's greatest strengths.

"We believe a compact Games alone is not enough," Uğur Erdener, President of the Turkish National Olympic Committee, told his fellow IOC members.

"It must be a once-in-a-lifetime experience."

Making his way out of the meeting, Hasan Arat, bid chairman, smilingly pronounced himself "very positive about our situation today".


Babacan – an Ankara native and clearly an accomplished platform performer – fielded most of the tough questions in the media conference that followed, insisting, "I did talk about the protests" to IOC members, and that Turkey was a country "continuously improving its democracy".

He sought to emphasise the diversity of the Istanbul protestors and said that the Government had "listened" to them.

But he argued that violence was "not something that should be tolerated" and defended authorities' right to respond with a "proportional reaction".

Babacan also tried to allay concerns raised by recent comments on social media – a phenomenon of huge, and rising, significance to young people and hence the Olympic Movement – made by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish Prime Minister.


Babacan said that Turkey needed to develop "inclusive policies", while ensuring that this medium was not used for "illegal purposes".

Where possible though, he continued to highlight Turkey's economic vigour, in a performance reminiscent in some ways of Rio 2016's use of Henrique Meirelles, the Brazilian Central Bank Governor – and, it should be said, a far more austere presence than Babacan – in the closing stages of the South American city's winning campaign.

Turkey, Babacan said, was already the 16th-biggest world economy – and would be much bigger by Games-time in 2020.

Faced with two rivals with mature economies, the strategy was readily comprehensible.

It may have left some IOC members wanting more "fire" – but it might just have kept Istanbul in the 2020 race.

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