The atmosphere of exuberance before the massed ranks of the world’s television cameras was so overpowering that even Jacques Rogge, the legendarily sober IOC boss, cracked a smile.

As the host-city contract was signed, the aisles rang out with song as supporters gave vent to months – in some cases years – of bottled-up tension.

Let’s just say it was no surprise when some Brazilian geezer took it upon himself to scatter golden confetti over proceedings.

Yet the main lesson from Rio’s win had little to do with its global reputation as a good-time town.

The Brazilians had done their homework and prepared mightily for this special moment.

Plus they had endured disappointments along the way.

In the race for the 2012 Games, Rio didn’t make it onto the shortlist.

What they did do was react to the defeat in exactly the right way.

As Rogge observed tonight, Carlos Nuzman and his team "remained humble".

He went on: "Rio wanted to listen, to correct the shortcomings.

"They learnt a lot."

Two elements in particular transformed them from also-rans into winners in what was the toughest-ever Olympic hosting race with the exception of that contest for 2012.

First, they gathered critical experience in the complex disciplines of staging multi-sports events by hosting the Pan-American Games two years ago.

This was touched on by Sergio Cabral, Governor of Rio de Janeiro state, when he alluded to a "new model of policing" introduced for the Games – an innovation that helped to address one of the bid’s possible weaknesses: Rio’s reputation as a relatively crime-ridden metropolis.

They also signed up the Government, in the shape of the irrepressibly ebullient President Lula, for the long haul.

His appearance in Copenhagen contrasted strongly with the Air Force One-powered flit undertaken by President Barack Obama.

The time and energy Lula devoted to getting under the skin of the Olympic Movement gave him a markedly better feeling than his US counterpart for which strings to pull and buttons to press to get the result he wanted from this endlessly fascinating electorate.

Having addressed these two basics – and being imbued in the form of Nuzman and Joao Havelange, the longest-serving IOC member, with two senior figures the Movement knew it could do business with - Rio was in a much stronger position to tweak the IOC’s sense of guilt about never having taken its sporting pageant to the South American sub-continent.

Lula pressed this as far as he dared in the presentation, urging the IOC to "light the Olympic cauldron in a tropical country".
 

This message eventually hit home, as shown by the emphatic margin of victory in Rio’s run-off against Madrid.

As Richard Carrión, the IOC member from Puerto Rico who is one of the body’s leading business strategists, observed straight after Rio’s victory was declared:

"I don't think it is anything to do with heads of state.

"I think Rio captured the moment with the idea of bringing the Games to South America for the first time…So kudos to Rio."

A second fundamental thrust to its campaign right up to the finishing-line was to underline time and time again not, as you might have expected, Rio’s legendary status as a party town, but that Brazil, unlike in days gone by, was now a sound financial bet.

Cabral took pains to emphasise that the government would subsidise the organising committee to the tune of $700 million (£439 million). (The figure is underlined and typed in bold in my copy of Cabral’s text.)

In this context, the inclusion of Central Bank Governor Henrique Meirelles in the presentation team was a master-stroke.

He had the gravitas to talk about Brazil’s booming economy with far more authority than the incorrigibly bullish Lula could have mustered.

Perhaps the message to the United States Olympic Committee should be that next time the country bids, the President should be accompanied on Air Force One by Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve President.

In retrospect, though they appeared to be closing in the final weeks of the campaign – and though their first-round elimination was met with gasps of astonishment – Chicago left it until far too late to start singing from the IOC’s song-sheet.

Though the bid was technically as sound as any ever mounted by a US city, too many sources of friction had emerged in the course of a long campaign for it to do itself justice.

Ultimately, not even a bravura performance by the First Lady could undo the damage.

In this sense, the biggest message from tonight’s result is that it is becoming nearly impossible for even the world's only superpower to win a race of this calibre coming from a long way behind in the finishing straight.

There may be no stopping them now.

Brazil is already staging the 2014 World Cup.

And there was talk from some bright spark in that exultant final conference of a Winter Olympic bid some time after 2016.

In their current mood, the ice-bound cities of the world must hope he was joking.