This morning the Olympics committee announced the winner of the 2016 bid in Copenhagen. I was really excited, because I’ve been keeping up with it for months (my friend works in the committee for Chicago) and I was really feeling the spirit. My office is also conveniently located next to Daley Plaza where the city was gathering to watch the announcement, so every now and then I’d look out the window to see. There were banners everywhere, they dyed the fountain orange, they were giving out orange tees (I would’ve gotten one too if the line wasn’t so long), they put a crown and medal on the art statue, it was all very festive! I really thought we had a chance. The 2012 Olympics is going to be in London, so they were not going to have it in Europe again. China just did it in 2008, so bye bye Tokyo. Rio has a good chance locationwise, but then they’re doing the 2014 World Cup already, so isn’t it just a tiny bit greedy of them to do the 2016 Olympics as well (in my head, both are big international events)?  Plus, we had the Obama effect, whatever that is worth. Obviously I wasn’t the only one thinking this, since people were bidding 60% for Chicago a mere 48 hours before.

So we were very disappointed when we saw people swiftly trickling out of the plaza indicating that we’d lost- first round! People around the world must really hate America. I was vouching for Madrid in the semi finals, just because Brazil it doesn’t seem fair and I’ve always wanted to go to Spain, but alas Rio won out. To give them credit, they did seem to have a bigger, more enthusiastic crowd in Rio watching the announcement than Chicago (in Chicago’s defense, we had to work!).