Party over for London

By Andrew Fraser and Francis Keogh
BBC Sport in Singapore and London

After the party came the horror.

In Singapore's Raffles City Convention centre the scene of undbridled joy just hours earlier was hit by an eerie shockwave.

Coe: 'Shocked and saddened'

While Wednesday brought the Olympic Games back to London after a cliffhanger vote in Singapore, Thursday saw terrorism rock the capital city 7,000 miles away.

At the Olympic convention centre, bid officials, supporters and hundreds of journalists from around the world were winding down, packing their bags and getting ready to leave.

The explosions, on three underground trains and one double-decker bus, hit London in the morning rush hour.

With the time difference, it was seven hours ahead in a humid Singapore afternoon as the journalists in the press room watched the news unfold on the same screens where they had seen London's victory announced 27 hours earlier.

Stunned International Olympic Committee members only discovered the horrors of terror hitting London when they came out of a closed-doors session.

The mood was sombre as British people tried to telephone or text family and friends back home, with limited success due to network problems.

Journalists combined covering the news with checking on loved ones.

What had mattered so much a day earlier, such as the anglo-French rivalry of the vote showdown, counted for little now.

I'm very sad and I feel their pain French Olympic chief Henri Serandour Report: IOC offer sympathy

French Olympic Committee president Henri Serandour sent a message of condolence to the British Olympic Association.

"It's terrible. I saw it on the TV screens outside the hall where our British friends were celebrating victory last night," Serandour told BBC Sport.

"On the TV we saw people happy to be organising the Games and welcoming young people of the world.

"They have been hit by the most cowardly thing, these attacks that strike at random and claim innocent victims. I'm very sad and I feel their pain."

Members of London's bid team had spent the morning after their dramatic 2012 Olympics triumph shuffling groggily around the corridors of their Carlton Hotel headquarters.

Just hours earlier, they had unleashed two years of pent-up emotions by partying through the night to celebrate London's nerve-jangling victory over Paris.

Swanky waterfront bar Indochine became their Trafalgar Square as they quaffed champagne and belted out the party tunes that are de rigueur on such occasions.

Party tracks like Celebrate and We are the Champions rang out as unlikely partners danced the night away.

The cruel irony of those songs will not have been lost on those who are arriving back in a forlorn UK.

Winning bid leader Lord Coe, hailed as Lord of the Rings in Thursday morning's newspapers, now faces difficult questions about security and transport fears for the Games.

Coe will be ready for the new challenge, perhaps hoping Britons can join together and use the Olympics as a unifying force for the future.

This is the man who started writing the speech for his crucial bid presentation at 4am last Saturday. Two hours later, he had the inspirational words which helped bring the Games to London.

His flight back from Singapore was four times as long.

It had every right to feel much, much longer.