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SAO PAULO — Brazil’s president feared Barack Obama’s star power could have prevented Rio de Janeiro from landing the 2016 Olympics.
“I confess to you that we were very worried when Obama arrived in Copenhagen,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said. “We were very worried because the American presence was a very important thing.”
But Silva added that his best argument to counter Obama’s last-minute lobbying ahead of last week’s vote was that the United States had already held the games several times and no South American nation ever had.
