Peter Williams: Americans face long wait for next Olympics

Barack Obama was to be the coup de grace for the Chicago Olympic bid in Copenhagen last weekend. But the Windy City's humiliating first-round elimination should not necessarily be seen as a snub for the world's most powerful man.

Instead, he and his home town were more like embarrassed bystanders in a festering row between the IOC and the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) which, as with all things to do with the Olympics, is about power, politics and money.

IOC members remember the last two Olympic Games in the US with little affection. Atlanta in 1996 was dogged with considerable logistical issues.

Salt Lake City's Winter Games of 2002 were surrounded with scandal over the bidding process. But, apart from the sour taste those games left, the IOC is still seething over a deal done more than two decades ago which gives the USOC 20 per cent of IOC sponsorship income from American companies (McDonalds, Kodak, Coca-Cola, etc) and 13 per cent of US broadcast rights income.

It was a necessity of the time, a deal concluded when the Olympic movement was on its knees in the early 1980s and saved only by the commercially-funded 1984 Games in Los Angeles. But it's outgrown its usefulness.

Then, in July, the USOC announced plans to start a cable TV network featuring Olympic archive material and programming about the 40 or more Olympic sports, including coverage of Games trials.

That went down like a lead balloon at IOC headquarters as they thought of the impact it could have on future deals with American networks after the current $2.2 billion contract with NBC expires following London in 2012.

The American television deal is the single most important income stream for the IOC and already CBS, ESPN as well as NBC are lining up to bid for the 2014-2016 cycle and beyond.

Quite why the USOC would want to do anything to upset that deal is baffling, considering they get that huge cut of it anyway. The USOC says it's about giving their minority sports exposure in the non-Olympic periods but you wonder how much interest there'd be in national table tennis trials or flat water kayaking.

After not inconsiderable pressure from the Chicago bid and the IOC broadcast commission, the USOC has delayed its plans for the TV network indefinitely but the damage was done.

The good news is that Rio de Janeiro is still more or less in the same time zones, making the 2016 Games hugely attractive and convenient to US television audiences, and therefore lucrative to the IOC.

But the relationship between Lausanne and (USOC headquarters) Colorado Springs remains tetchy.

And because the IOC is unlikely to want the Games in North America straight after 2016 in South America, there will be no Olympic Games, winter or summer in the US until at least 2022, fully two decades after Salt Lake City and 26 years after Atlanta.

Does this mean the IOC is confident it can maintain the progress of the world's largest sports organisation without needing to rely so comprehensively on American money? Does it see the emerging economies of Asia and South America becoming just as important as the US in its long-term plans?

The success or otherwise of Rio 2016 will go some way towards answering those questions.