Chicago never had a chance

“We don’t have any political capital,’’ says USOC chairman Larry Probst, who only has been on the job for a year. “We don’t have leverage.’’

Their foreign colleagues treat the Americans like the obnoxious rich kid who is tolerated because he picks up the tab. The USOC’s internal squabbling and revolving-door chief executives (six in nine years) have made the committee appear unstable and vulnerable to power plays, like the IOC’s push to reduce the USOC’s cut from American TV fees (12.75 percent) and global marketing revenues (20 percent), which will jump from roughly $300 million to $450 million during this quadrennium.

Negotiations on that issue were postponed until after the 2016 vote but they’ll be back on the table soon, and with Probst and acting CEO Stephanie Streeter both under fire from the USOC’s domestic sports bodies the timing couldn’t be worse. Although the board gave both Probst and Streeter votes of confidence last week, Streeter will be stepping down by the year’s end and Probst is being pressured to follow.

The bad blood between the IOC and the USOC goes back at least as far as the 1980 boycott and was worsened by the Salt Lake bidding scandal which cost the IOC a tenth of its membership. Though the USOC had made some progress by hiring Bob Fasulo three years ago as its international relations director and naming Bob Ctvrtlik its vice president for international affairs, repairing the relationship is a long-term challenge.

“I think we still don’t have the horsepower to do the politicking,’’ says Ctvrtlik, the former Olympic volleyball gold medalist who served as an IOC member for eight years. “International engagement takes a lot of time.’’

Chicago, which spent four years and $50 million on an excellent bid, ended up the loser in the IOC-USOC skirmish. “They had a fight long before we got involved,’’ said bid leader Pat Ryan, who described their relationship as a “Hatfield and McCoy deal . . . It was not resolved.’’

Until it is, there’s little use in any other American city bidding for the Games. As it is, there probably won’t be a candidate until at least 2022. The USOC isn’t in the chase for the 2018 Winter Games and the choice of Rio de Janeiro makes it highly unlikely the IOC will come back to the same hemisphere for 2020. That race already is shaping up with Istanbul, Budapest, and Delhi expressing interest and Hiroshima and Nagasaki planning a joint bid on a theme of world peace on what would be the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings.

Why did Chicago manage only 18 of 94 votes in the first round after figuring on at least a couple of dozen? Bloc balloting reckoned several IOC members with Tokyo, regarded as the weakest of the four candidates, lining up enough support to beat Chicago by four votes. “If we had reached the second round, it would have been a lot different,’’ said Ryan. “But I’m not saying we would have won.’’ More surprising than Rio’s victory was its 66-32 gap over Madrid, which matched Beijing’s margin over Toronto for 2008.

The USOC won’t have much time to conduct a search for its next CEO, who ideally will be in place for the Winter Games in February. While the salary is attractive - Streeter reportedly is making $560,000 - there are likely to be few candidates with the background that Probst envisions - experience as a corporate CEO, a background in international sport, multilingual fluency, and willingness to travel extensively overseas.

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com; material from Olympic committees, international and domestic sports federations, personal interviews, and wire services was used in this report.