Chicago, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo are locked in a contest for the 2016 Summer Games that most observers, including even International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge, have described as too close to call.

The IOC votes for its 2016 Games site on Oct. 2 in Copenhagen.

Chicago is, hands-down, the best bid the United States has ever put forward for a Summer Games.

Chicago absolutely could win.

Chicago absolutely could lose.

In my next column, I will detail 10 reasons why Chicago will win.

Here are 10 reasons why Chicago will lose:

1. President Obama doesn’t appear in Copenhagen on the bid’s behalf.

The American effort touts a historic alignment of local, state and federal interests and, as well, a public-private partnership. The White House has, in a first, established an Olympic office, headed by senior aide Valerie Jarrett. President Obama and the First Lady have made plain that getting kids to make healthy exercise and nutrition choices is a priority — which aligns neatly with his health-care reform campaign. Moreover, the Chicago Olympic project would be worth billions of dollars, and in a down economy. All that — and yet the president, who used to live just blocks from where Olympic Stadium would be located, can’t make it to Copenhagen to pitch the project?

This is no knock on the First Lady. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment of the emphatic statement Barack and Michelle Obama would make together in Copenhagen.

Speculation about whether the president will attend, or not, is now furious. An Olympic newsletter, Atlanta-based Around the Rings, citing a single source identified only as someone “familiar with planning for the IOC meeting,” on Thursday reported Obama would attend. In response, a White House official noted that an advance team had been sent Monday to Copenhagen to “preserve the president’s option to travel to the meeting in Copenhagen” but also said “there has not been a final decision made on whether the president will be able to attend.”

2. The U.S. Olympic Committee’s botched announcement in July of its own television network.

The IOC told the USOC not to go ahead with the plan. The USOC did it, anyway — in a move that ignited lingering resentment aimed at the USOC over its singular shares within the so-called “Olympic family” of certain broadcasting and marketing revenues. The network controversy stopped being a front-burner item within Olympic political circles only when USOC chairman Larry Probst, a month after the July announcement, went to Berlin and agreed there after a meeting with Rogge that the USOC would put the brakes on the project. But has all that resentment gone away?

3. Those revenue shares.

The USOC gets 12.75 percent of the U.S. television rights fee and 20 percent (in practice, 16 percent) of the IOC’s top-level marketing program revenues. Of the 205 national Olympic committees, it’s the only one getting that kind of a split. That explains in part why there’s such resentment. In March, at a meeting in Denver, the IOC and USOC called a truce. But then came the network announcement in July. Whatever goodwill may have been engendered in Denver in March — gone. And it may well be that all those resentments were even hardened. It’s important to note that there runs within the IOC, which is dominated by European interests, a current of anti-American sentiment, and though senior IOC figures consistently deny such a thing is true — it’s true, and such sentiment was particularly stirred during the presidency of George W. Bush.

4. No Seb Coe.

Double Olympic gold medalist on the track in the 1980s. Then Conservative MP and private secretary to William Hague. Made a peer — Lord Coe — in 2002. Senior figure in track and field administration. Charismatic and personable. Credible and thoughtful. Chairman of London’s winning 2005 bid for the 2012 Summer Games, now atop the London 2012 organizing committee.

There may be no one quite like him from among any of the four 2016 cities. For sure, there’s no one like him in the Chicago bid.

5. Larry Probst and Stephanie Streeter.

Probst is the USOC chairman. Streeter is the acting chief executive officer. The IOC is heavily protocol driven. In June, the IOC held a big meeting at its Lausanne, Switzerland, headquarters, at which all the bid cities were invited to make presentations to the members. Most of the roughly 105 members showed up. Probst and Streeter didn’t. In a race that may swing on but one or two votes, some within IOC circles view their absence as a significant protocol gaffe.

6. Turnover at the USOC.

The IOC likes to do business with people it knows and trusts; it is intensely relationship driven. Including Norm Blake’s 10-month stint and Lloyd Ward’s 16-month tenure, Streeter is the USOC’s fifth chief executive since 2000 — and she is serving now in an “acting” capacity, the USOC vowing to undertake a search in the fourth quarter of 2009. Probst, meantime, is the sixth to serve as chairman (or before that, president - the title has changed) since 2000. Is it any wonder the USOC might, for example, be susceptible to protocol missteps?

7. The map that Rio shows (understandably) at every occasion.

That map conveys without a single word the emotional pull of the Rio campaign: the Summer Games have never been staged in South America. Rio is the only one of the four 2016 candidates to have produced such a compelling argument. And the IOC’s evaluation commission report clearly downplayed crime and other concerns when assessing Rio’s candidacy. Is it, simply, Rio’s time?

8. The Samaranch factor.

Juan Antonio Samaranch served as IOC president for 21 years, from 1980 to 2001. Samaranch, who still retains considerable influence within the IOC, is from Spain. Madrid is of course the capital of Spain.

The Games were in Barcelona in 1992.  The Samaranch appeal now is both elemental and elegant: Perhaps I am nearing the end of my time. (He is now 89.) Would you please consider, as a final gesture, granting my country the honor of staging the Games again in 2012?

9. That unpredictable first round.

The IOC votes by secret ballot, which means no one is publicly accountable for his or her vote. Inevitably, that means there’s a lot of blatant disinformation floating around about who might or might not be voting for whom.

To win typically means carrying about 55 votes. Getting there typically involves proceeding through rounds of voting; the city receiving the fewest votes drops out after each round. The first round sees the playing out of discrete political agendas that may or may not have anything to do with the ultimate result — so the key is simply to get through Round One.

For instance, in the 2005 vote for 2012, London ultimately won in the fourth round, defeating Paris, 54-50. Here are the 2012 first-round numbers, which underscore the volatility of that first round: London 22, Paris 21, Madrid 20, New York 19, Moscow 15.

New York went out in the second round, with only 16 votes — not even as many as it got in Round One. For many months afterward, it wasn’t clear that the United States would, or even should, bid for 2016.

10. The American press

The sort of critical analysis in this column isn’t being done in Portuguese, Spanish or Japanese; or if it is, it isn’t getting wide exposure within the movement, which moves mostly in English and in French. At the same time, the U.S. press corps, and in particular the nature of the hotly competitive Chicago newspaper and television scene, has produced probably more critical media coverage on and about the Chicago effort than all the other bids combined. The drumbeat of such coverage naturally gets noticed.

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