IOC grandee rates London neck and neck with Paris

A leading member of the International Olympic Committee has given London's bid to host the 2012 games a huge boost by declaring that it has now caught up with Paris, the favourite since the process began.

"Two of the five cities are neck and neck and the others can't be discounted," said Australia's Kevan Gosper, an IOC vice-president. "Conventional wisdom is saying Paris has probably got its head still in front and has been a constant bidder but London is also performing very, very well."

It is unusual for an IOC member, let alone one so senior, to comment on how the bidding process is going and Gosper's insight gives a rare glimpse into what is happening in the byzantine world of sports politics that will ultimately determine to which city the games are awarded.

It also emerged yesterday that the first draft of the IOC's evaluation report, to be published in June, puts London level with Paris and New York and says the city's three technical bids are so good they cannot be separated.

Coe and his team are said to have won the best marks for their presentations to the commission, who visited the capital last month. Especially impressive is that Coe appears to have convinced the commission that London's oft-criticised transport system is capable of supporting the games.

Coe will want to drive home that message on Saturday in Brisbane, when he addresses the 15-member Oceania National Olympic Committees - of which Gosper is the president and which includes countries scattered throughout the Pacific from Guam to American Samoa, Fiji and New Zealand. The meeting will hear 15-minute submissions from London, Paris, Madrid, Moscow and New York.

Coe has decided to make the trip to Australia despite the recent death of his 74-year-old mother, whose funeral is tomorrow. Coe will be joined by Keith Mills, the bid's chief executive, and Craig Reedie, one of Britain's three IOC members. Jacques Rogge, the president of the IOC, will officially open the meeting.

With less than 100 days to the final vote at an IOC meeting in Singapore on July 6, all five cities are engaged in an exhausting schedule of travelling around the world to try to influence voters. Other trips Coe will undertake during the next few weeks include journeys to Berlin and Accra, Ghana, while the culture secretary Tessa Jowell is currently visiting India to try to secure support.

"It's not so much that we're a big constituency of the Olympic movement," said Gosper, a former senior executive with Shell, of ONOC. "But under today's rules they [the bidders] take any opportunity to make contact with IOC members who can vote. We have five [IOC voting members] out here of 115. We're not big boys but we are a part of it."

Gosper played a key role in the bid process in 1993, when Sydney won the right to host the 2000 games. The Australian city was trailing until the night before the vote in Monte Carlo but ended up beating Beijing by two votes. He said: "From our own experience these decisions can be changed by just one voter."