After failing to achieve victory in the election process of the host city of the 2012 Summer Olympics, the city council of Madrid decided to nominate it a candidate to host the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics on July 3, 2006. The nomination was encouraged by statements of the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Jacques Rogge, that European cities would still have a chance to host the 2016 Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) launched the bidding process for the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics on May 16, 2007. On May 30, 2007, the candidature was formalized by the Spanish Olympic Committee (SOC) with claims to be "radically new" and more prepared than the city's last attempt to host the Olympics. The IOC announced that seven cities—Baku, Chicago, Doha, Madrid, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo—were submitted by their respective NOCs to bid for the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Madrid bid committee attended the 2016 Applicant Cities' Seminar in Lausanne, Switzerland, on October 18, 2007, where it learnt more about the bidding process. The Application Files, which contain the answers and guarantees requested by the IOC's 2016 Candidature Acceptance Procedure and Questionnaire, were returned by all seven applicant cities to the IOC on January 14, 2008. The responses were studied by the IOC Working Group and the IOC Executive Board, at the latter meeting to decide which cities would be accepted as candidate cities.