Friday, October 2, was the D-day for the four cities that had put in bids to stage the next edition of the Olympic Games, after London must have played host to the rest of the world in 2012.

Chicago, U.S.A, Madrid, Spain, Tokyo, Japan and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil had each put in powerful bids to be given the sole right by the International Olympic Committee IOC, to stage the games.

Representatives of the four cities had spent months unending lobbying the estimated 101 IOC executives mandated to take part in the voting. Ordinarily, the president of the committee does not vote, as well as the U.S., Brazil, Spain and Japan, as long as each country had a city in the running to host the Olympics.

The process of selecting a candidate-city has never been easy. Friday, October 2, was for instance, and as far as the I.O.C.'s voting rules were concerned, supposed to be the first round of voting. If no city had received a majority of the votes cast, the city with the fewest votes would have been dropped from the list for a second round of voting. If still no majority winner emerged, a third round of voting would have been held between the two cities that got the most votes in the second round.

So, everyone had expected a long wait for the four bidding cities. Somewhere along the line, Chicago was initially thought to be in the forefront. Not only had the city, located in the northern U.S. state of Illinois, put in a particularly strong bid, but during the final presentations by the four cities, the country's inspirational president, Barak Obama, did break with tradition to appear in person in Copenhagen, where the vote was to be held, and made an equally powerful case for the bid of his home-city.

Other world leaders were also present to plead the case for their respective bids, such as, Brazil's equally charismatic president, Ignacio Lula who called it "ground-breaking"-adding: "This is international citizenship. We're no longer second-class. We're now first-class; but, that's one better and no worse, and we're equals. That's all we aspire to be."

Clearly, Lula's words or imposing presence wouldn't have been sufficient to make Rio prevail. Instead, the argument(s) in favour of the South Americans were pretty convincing, if the margin of victory on the night was something to go by, which it was. Even if Tokyo's bid was premised on an environmentally-friendly Games, South America had never hosted the Olympics, while in recent years at least, Asia has hosted twice, including Beijing (China) in 2008 and twenty-years before in Seoul (South Korea).

In addition to earlier hosting-rights given to it in the earlier eras of the Olympic movement, the U.S. through Los Angeles in 1984 and Atlanta, twelve years later, had staged the Games, and that would have counted against Chicago's bid.

Somehow, also, Madrid's bid was undermined by the fact that Barcelona hosted the games back in 1992, and since the Spanish capital, i.e. Madrid, had gone into the October 2 vote as the sole European representative in the park, I.O.C. members would similarly have taken into account the fact that European cities have hosted the world's sporting show several times since the 1920's, in addition to those of 1976, 1992, 2004 (in Athens, Greece) and the forthcoming 2012 Games which has already been given vetoed to London.