There are some puzzling things about the Chicago's bid to host the 2016 Olympics.

The reason Chicago came in fourth is not one of them. No American city can host an international competition; it's too hard to get into the country, as the Pakistani representative to the Olympic Committee pointed out, and citizens of a number of competing countries would find it almost impossible to get a U.S. visa.

The first puzzling thing is why Obama went to support Chicago's bid. Presidents usually don't. His political opponents criticized him for leaving the country when so much was happening - the health care bill, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy. When the bid failed, they were pleased and pointed out Obama was not particularly influential internationally.

The second puzzling thing is why Chicago wanted to host the Games. Recent hosts have spent far more on staging the games than they've earned in tourist revenue.

The third puzzling thing is why someone as politically astute and historically aware as Obama wanted any US city to host the Olympics.. Terrorism has been part of the Olympics for awhile now. In 1968, eleven members of the Israeli wrestling squad were killed in a terrorist attack. In Atlanta, a single terrorist set a bomb and two members of the public were killed. In Sydney, a plot was discovered to bomb a nuclear reactor. The US has homegrown, solitary lunatics, like the Unabomber, who would find the Olympics irresistible.  Organized non-American terrorists would be attracted as well.

The fourth puzzling thing is the choice of Rio de Janeiro as the winner. South America has never hosted the games; a good reason to choose a South American country. Rio is used to tourists. They treat tourists very well. Everybody loves Carnival.

In the early nineties, Newspapers were full of reports of the just how far Rio was willing to go to protect the tourist trade. Shopkeepers hired off-duty policemen to shoot the feral children living in gangs in the city, surviving by theft and begging. I worked in London and shared an office with a couple of computer science graduate students from Argentina. I asked them about the newspaper reports. They thought killing children was a perfectly reasonable solution to a difficult problem. What else could you do with them? one asked me.

I can't think of any previous Olympic city that has had quite the disparity between the rich and poor as Rio presents. It combines the worst of the nineteenth century, desperate poverty and a brutal elite, with the worst of the twentieth century, polluted vast urban sprawl.  Who knows? Maybe that’s what the twenty-first century will be.