It was a gamble with precious prestige, dashing off to Copenhagen in hopes of persuading the International Olympic Committee to site its 2016 games in Chicago. And now that the effort has come a cropper, a question inevitably occurs: After the misadventure, can Oprah hope to ever regain the authority she had before the trip?
As they say, only time will tell.
President Barack Obama, however, will be just fine, and America’s ability in the world along with him. Few if any capitals saw a superpower’s future riding on a side trip anyway, as 24-hour cable news, with too much time on its hands, seemed to. Or as the Republican Party, in its chosen role as full-time Chicken Little, certainly did.
It is curious: If this president and his wife take a night off to see a play in New York City or go out for an anniversary dinner in Washington, the boo-birds flock, decrying wasted time and taxpayer money. But apparently the brush around the previous president’s home was such a national menace that it was OK for him to make countless trips to Crawford to keep it down.
True, Democrats, in their turn, have taken similar cheap shots when Republican presidents strayed into their popgun crosshairs. But Obama seems to be unable to so much as swivel in his Oval Office chair than a wrong move is declared.
If you insist upon being sober about it, there were some more or less serious matters tangled in the Olympic minidrama.
Not least, a reminder that intra-Olympic politics can be as fierce as any Chicago ward’s. This time, it looks as though there was a general agreement to eliminate the U.S. bid right off, to block a head-to-head with Brazil in which Chicago might have prevailed. And Asian nations may have jumped to Japan’s side to keep it out of last place in the first-round voting, dumping Chicago into that spot.
Too, the IOC and the U.S. Olympic Committee have been at odds with one another for years.
The Americans have often sniffed at the IOC hierarchy as plutocrats of international sport, swanking and freeloading their way through pricey digs around the world. The IOC’s heavyweights deplore what they see as the mercantilism of the USOC and its failure to buy into “Olympism” as a world-saving movement. (In fact, that “movement” is often a beard for the IOC’s own money-grubbing.)
And, yes, it is likely that there was some unacknowledged anti-Americanism at work in Copenhagen, part of it residual bitterness from the WMD scam Washington used to fast-walk the U.N. into putting up with, and even seeming into endorse, the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
But the closer? Everyone seems to agree Chicago put together a terrific bid, but, in the end, Rio de Janeiro had the case. South America has never hosted the games, Brazil has been coming on strong economically and politically for several years and the Olympic laurel could help solidify Brazil’s emergence — a coup, if so, for the Olympics’ movement claims.
Oprah will attend.
Tom Teepen writes for Cox Newspapers. E-mail address: teepencolumn@earth link.net.
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