London will the host the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee announced today in Singapore.

The British capital, which last hosted the Games in 1948, was given the edge over Paris, the widely-perceived favorite, in a narrow 54-50 vote.

Moscow and New York, the lone non-European bid city, were eliminated in the first two rounds of voting, before Madrid, the Spanish capital, was eliminated in the third, paving the way for the northern European showdown. As late as last weekend, when a crowd of more than 70,000 filled the Stade de France in Paris for the IAAF Golden League kick-off meet and the final public show of support for its bid, the French capital was widely hailed as a shoe-in. Banners, signs, stickers and billboards decorated Parisian boulevards, buses and its metro and rail lines. Also a two-time host, Paris last staged the Olympics in 1924.

In a statement issued from Singapore today, International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) President Lamine Diack was diplomatic, praising all five bid cities, but added that in the end the best candidate won.

"On the day though, London's presentation was excellent, and this was a race with only one winner," Diack said. "The IAAF is pleased that London will host these Games in 2012 because Great Britain has always been a great country for sport and particularly our sport of athletics. I was impressed by the plans to develop sporting facilities over the next years, and I would like to underline the fact that Britain will now have a permanent, state of the art stadium for athletics, and this is something we are very pleased about."

Stadium snafus in recent years hindered Britain's ability to attract major international sporting events, but the final presentation by Lord Sebastian Coe, a former world record holder and Olympic champion in the middle distances, was widely viewed as the key in the London bid's victory.

"Some might say your decision is between five similar bids but that would undervalue the opportunity before us," Coe said during his presentation. "In the past you have made bold decisions which have taken the movement forward in powerful and exciting ways. "It's a decision about which city will help us show a new generation their sport matters, that in a world of many distractions that Olympic sport matters, in the 21st century why the Olympic ideal matters so much. On behalf of the youth of today and the Olympics of the future we humbly submit the bid of London 2012."