The long wait is finally over, and the vote has gone Singapore’s way. Beginning with a field of eleven cities, the competition to host the first-ever Youth Olympic Games was narrowed down to five cities in November 2007, then further reduced to Singapore and Moscow in January 2008.

On this night, Thursday, February 21, 2008, at 7 p.m., a day that will live long in the memory of the 9,000 people who were at the Padang and the hundreds of thousands more watching at home on television, the world witnessed an improbable fact, that tiny little Singapore had more friends than Moscow, the largest city in Europe and the capital of Russia.