While her husband arrived on cue from Washington to finish the presentation to International Olympic Committee members, his address, while demonstrating the seamless eloquence we have come to expect, was effectively demoted to the silver medal position by the First Lady’s moving account of her childhood on the South Side of Chicago and how much a Games in Chicago would have meant to her father had still been alive.

"My dad was my hero," she said.
 

In truth, the First Family rescued a presentation that had been well-meaning but rather dull and disjointed, mixing impressive film footage of the city and its inhabitants with a series of awkwardly delivered contributions from the likes of the bid’s chief executive Patrick Ryan and the city Mayor, Richard Daley.
 

The low point, however, was an excruciatingly wooden exchange between Olympic decathlon champion Bryan Clay and 1996 Paralympic champion Linda Mastandrea in which the former vouched for the fact that he had responded to his first experience of competing in an Olympic arena by breaking down tears.
 

"Really?" Linda responded, rehearsily.

"You did?"

As if Clay was going to respond: "No. I was only saying that."

Linda, however, did deliver one of the few nuggets of genuine information by mentioning that 90 per cent of the athletes at the Chicago Games would be 15 minutes or less from their training venues.
 

It was an allusion to the compact nature of the Chicago bid, a strength which was never coherently highlighted.
 

The First Lady, who has been energetically canvassing votes here since throwing the Danish capital into a tizz with her arrival on Wednesday, raised the altitude of the presentation to oxygen-deprived levels as she spoke of how she had watched the Olympics on television with her father, who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in his 30s.
 

"Even when my Dad was on crutches he never stopped playing with myself and my brother," she added.

"He taught me to throw a ball, and a mean right hook, better than any boy in the neighbourhood. 

"If he had lived to see the Games in Chicago, I know it would have restored in him the same sense of unbridled possibilities he instilled in his children."
 

The IOC members, who had already been warned not show bias during the presentations, had sat silently as the Obamas walked into the Bella Centre with the rest of 12-member Chicago delegation.
 

They received the message they must have expected when President Obama made reference to his own election last November as a moment when people from around the world gathered in Chicago to celebrate that "our diversity could be a source of strength."
 

"There is nothing I would like more than to step just a few blocks from my family's home and with Michelle and our two girls welcome the world back to our neighborhood," Obama added.

"At the beginning of this new century, the nation that has been shaped by people from around the world wants a chance to inspire it once more."
 

But while the President operated with customary ease despite offering a couple of signs of fatigue in what was a visit to the Danish capital lasting no more than five hours, it was his wife he eventually offered Chicago’s presentation the emotional super-charging it so desperately needed.
 

"I'm sure you'd all agree that she's a pretty big selling point," the President told his audience.

A selling point that may have been the telling factor in tipping IOC votes Chicago’s way.


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