COPENHAGEN - There may be 76 reasons why Chicago did not get the 2016 Olympics. One for every vote it did not get from the International Olympic Committee in the one round it bothered to consider America's latest failed bid for the Games.

But there is one thing the theories about the reasons have in common. Arrogance. Good ol' American arrogance.

Instead of dedicating three days and nights working the IOC members, as we hear Tony Blair did for London in its successful bid for 2012, President Obama figured all he had to do was show up for a few minutes here at Bella Center after an all-night flight on Air Force One.

He had normally blasé media types pressing their noses against the windows of this sleek convention center just to get a glimpse of him stepping into his flown-in Cadillac. His very presence shook down the tight schedule the IOC usually likes to keep. His very name peppered the cacophony of unfamiliar languages all over town with little hints of recognition.

But Obama was long gone by the time his ripple factor had flattened out. By then, Brazilian President Lula da Silva was wowing the room with his avuncular, rumpled flair.

"Among the countries that today compete to host the Games, we are the only one that has never had this honor," Lula reminded the IOC. "For the others, it will be just one more Games."

Lula came off more street savvy than his more-scripted comrades in world leadership. Looking like the old-guy version of Raymond Burr as Perry Mason. Sounding like a Portuguese-speaking Dick Vitale.

With his nearest spin doctor as far away as the Amazon, Lula made his counterparts - Obama, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and new Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatomaya - look like metrosexual façades. And the freshly scrubbed politician just did not resonate the way the guy with a face full of hair did.

Maybe this is the latest edition of the new world order. Four years ago it was Blair, slickly going where no politician had gone before. Vladimir Putin was inspired, shortly after. He showed up in Guatemala with a sudden ability to speak English, pushing Sochi, Russia, over the top in the bidding for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

By the time Obama made his cameo here in Copenhagen, the IOC had been there and done that. It was not much of an appearance after all.

Even the disgraced ex-president Juan Antonio Samaranch - pushed out the door in the wake of the Salt Lake City bribery scandal - reached out and grabbed his old IOC friends with his "I know I am near the end of my time, I am 89" speech on behalf of Madrid. Damned if it didn't get them to the final vote.

It is safe to say more people will remember Samaranch and Lula from Copenhagen 2009 than they will Obama. Air Force One made a bigger impression. But to say Chicago lost because Obama mailed this one in would be missing the problems churning deeper in the Olympic waters.

The IOC and the U.S. Olympic Committee have been at odds over money for years. American companies provide the biggest share of sponsorships; American TV networks have kept the cash flow constant. So the USOC commands a great deal of revenue, something that has to rub more than a few IOC members the wrong way.

Add the USOC's ill-timed and since-suspended decision this year to poke the sleeping bear and start its own TV network over the IOC's loud objections, and the kindling is there to ignite a firestorm against anything American.

The Obama factor was merely an interesting distraction to what was really going on inside the big clubhouse in the middle of this Danish nowhere.

So Chicago is summarily dismissed in one vote as New York had been in two votes four years ago in Singapore. So what's next for an American Olympics that will become no less than 16 years on from Salt Lake City 2002 and at least 24 years between Summer Games?

As New York went noisily into that good night, expect Chicago to do the same.

"It's already in this hemisphere with Rio, and it would not make sense for an American city to try again in 2020," Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley said. "It's in this hemisphere, and they have to move somewhere else."

Does that bring us back to Los Angeles - spurned this time around by a USOC convinced Chicago would be the better bidder? And does this mean putting in a call for 2024? Probably. By then, word is Paris will want to celebrate the centennial of its "Chariots of Fire" Olympics.

America, this Olympic thing may take a while.