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What led to Chicago losing 2016 Olympic bid | Emotion, interpersonal appeal and geographic appeal led to Chicago losing 2016 Olympic bid to eventual winner Brazil, say most in America. While there was no immediate explanation why
the International Olympic Committee in its first round of voting eliminated Chicago
from the 2016 Olympic bidding process, despite it being widely regarded as among
the strongest of the four finalists, the announcement stunned and frustrated not
only White House insiders but veteran Olympic watchers, reports Politico. According
to the website, it reinforced the inscrutable reputation that the IOC's secret
voting process has earned over the years. However, in Chicago, it prompted a round
of finger-pointing and sometimes novel explanations for the outcome: a sympathy
vote gone awry; a purposeful attempt to spread the Olympic wealth around the globe;
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had out-performed Obama; Chicago's
boosters had over-sold their bid to the White House; or just plain anti-Americanism.
"I'd be the last person to ask about the internal politics of the IOC," senior
White House advisor David Axelrod was quoted as saying in an appearance on MSNBC
soon after Chicago was eliminated. "Listen, we got thick enough politics in this
town, I haven't yet mastered that. I can't tell you what is going on inside that
room in Copenhagen," he added. Axelrod - whose former public relations firm has
some Olympic experience, having worked on Chicago's bid and worked against a stadium
central to New York City's failed bid for the 2012 Olympics - posited two theories
of his own. One was that Madrid, which was the last finalist eliminated, benefited
from the lobbying of former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, 89, who reminded
IOC members as he asked for their vote that he was "very near the end of my time."
It's "valuable when you have those kind of long-standing interpersonal relationships,"
Axelrod said of Samaranch, and he also singled out the "very aggressive" lobbying
by Brazil, which repeatedly reminded IOC members that South America had never
hosted an Olympic Games. The geographic appeal was a strong argument that played
to the Olympic ethos, according to Robert Livingstone, an expert in the closely
watched but opaque Olympic bid business who reported from Copenhagen for his influential
website GamesBids.com. "Rio had the emotion," said Livingstone, who just before
the voting began Friday, posted a story headlined "President Lula Stirs More Emotion
Than President Obama in Final Presentation." In it, he asserted "Chicago's overall
presentation was not at the same level of Rio's - it lacked a clear central message
and lacked excitement." Though polls had shown public support in Chicago for the
Olympics dropping off and a group of Chicagoans opposed to the Games had traveled
to Copenhagen to air their grievances, Livingstone said such sentiments seldom
impact the IOC's decisions. Outside factors aside, Chicago had "by far the best
bid," asserted Bill Mallon, who has consulted for the IOC and co-founded the International
Society of Olympic Historians. He said Chicago likely got eliminated in the first
round because IOC members gave "sympathy" votes to the lesser bids in the first
round, thinking those bids would get eliminated anyway, allowing them to shift
support to a stronger bid in subsequent rounds. In fact, Madrid came out ahead
in the first ballot with 28 votes, two more than Rio, six more than Tokyo and
10 more than Chicago. "There are so many parts of the world, that sometimes IOC
members don't want to embarrass cities, and give a few votes to some of the lesser
ones and then unfortunately the good bids drop away because of that," Mallon explained.
"Unfortunately, sometimes those token votes taken away from the good bids like
Chicago's add up. And in this case, that's what happened." Mallon, however, predicted
it might have been hard for Chicago to beat Rio because he asserted the IOC has
increasingly adopted an anti-American stance. |
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