It is hard to work out which to celebrate more loudly: the fact that the Olympic Games are going to Rio de Janeiro in 2016 or the fact that they are not going to Chicago. Well, nothing against Chicago, not in the summer, anyway — what I am cheering is the Games not going to the United States.

The American bid didn’t fail narrowly, either. Despite the presence of Barack Obama, it was kicked out in the first round of voting. It was the first city to go, the worst of the four finalists. This wasn’t the rejection of a flawed bid. The bid was excellent. It was the rejection of a nation. And more.

The Americans rescued the Games in 1984. When no one else wanted them, the Los Angeles Games took them on and changed the face of the Olympics, with a stress on volunteers and on commercial partners. The US saved the day. It was able to do so because of big business and American primetime television.

Just 12 years later, the Games were again held in the United States, this time in Atlanta. And it was a disaster, not just because of the appalling organisation and the bomb. It was a question of attitude. The can-do quality made the LA Olympics great; the complacency and arrogance of the US was at the heart of Atlanta’s failure. Atlanta and the US took a deeply patronising attitude to the Olympic Games and came unstuck.

Then came the scandals of Salt Lake City’s bid for the Winter Olympics of 2002, in which the lavish gift-giving to members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was at least partly revealed. After this, the IOC cleaned up its act, and not before time.

But I wonder if it wasn’t just the sloppy organisation and insolent security at Atlanta, and the worldly contemptuousness of the Salt Lake City bribes that persuaded the voters to throw Chicago out on its ear. Perhaps there was a feeling that the Americans had got it wrong on some far deeper level.

Certainly, ever since 1984, there has been a feeling that the Americans sort of owned the Olympics. It seemed that American dollars were essential in putting on the show. And perhaps there was a feeling that this relationship needed to be fairly radically adjusted. We needed a belated reminder that the Olympics belong to the world.

The United States is starved of international sport, being traditionally keen on parochial contests. It really has only the Olympic Games to express its sporting nationalism. All of which makes an American Olympic Games rather uncomfortable viewing. The audiences are just too partisan, blind to un-American excellence. Was it the memory of all those whoops that made the IOC members just say no?

The US also revels in the sentimentalisation of the Games. Every American winner is caricatured as a noble, self-sacrificing, patriotic hero. The US is obsessed with role models, so as long as an athlete does nothing to give offence, there are millions to be made and millions more for those in the exploitation business.

Am I right in suspecting that these cardboard cut-outs, this dire sentimentalisation of what sport is about, have eaten at the patience of IOC members? No doubt it was a mixture of these things, but it comes to one thing. The Olympic Games have said that there are more important things in sport than American dollars. The Games are likely to be richer as a result.

Cricket should offer clarity as rows grow over acts of charity

Cricket is the Hampton Court of sports: always ready to allow people to get lost in the finest and most complex of moral mazes. At the Champions Trophy, which ends in South Africa today, we have the question of whether or not a chap deserves a runner when he gets tired and whether or not a chap should be run out when he wanders dozily from his crease.

Andrew Strauss, the England captain, refused his South Africa counterpart, Graeme Smith, a runner when he was going down with cramp. Smith was furious. But Daniel Vettori, the New Zealand captain, withdrew an appeal against Paul Collingwood, of England, who had left his crease, even though Collingwood had not been so charitable when England played New Zealand last year and Grant Elliott collided with Ryan Sidebottom.

So, is a certain generosity towards opponents required by the elusive “Spirit of the Game”? Or is it preferable, as Mike Atherton, the chief cricket correspondent of The Times, said, to be hard-nosed on every one of these points? There is a case for either view; unfortunately, cricket has both views at the same time. There is no consensus. Cricketers don’t know what to do in these cases, are unsure of what is acceptably hard-nosed and what is crassly ungenerous.

Nobody walks in modern professional cricket and, good or bad, it is a convention that everybody knows. Therefore it works. Cricketers are desperate for clarification of these similar issues. But none comes, only the invocation of the holy spirit.

The only birdies that interest me on a golf course

I opened a Jiffy bag, took out an expensively produced booklet, saw that it was from the R&A and curled my lip in an ugly sneer. Do these golfing people never read the paper? Don’t they know who I am? Don’t they know about my often-expressed contempt for their “sport”?

I then saw that the booklet is called Birds and Golf Courses: A Guide to Habitat Management, a joint project between the R&A and the RSPB. It concerns the expanding practice of managing golf courses for conservation.

And I remembered the tree pipit I saw at my brief and calamitous visit to the Open at Sandwich a few years ago and how they had had breeding woodlarks on Aldeburgh golf course before the neighbouring nature reserve. So I have changed my tune. Good old golf! Well done, golfers! Bloody silly game, but that’s your business; this booklet shows a great attitude to land management.

Watmore on the offensive

One of the most firmly fixed traditions in sport is the fans’ inalienable right to be offensive. Footballer after footballer has spouted the same wisdom: fans can say what they like; after all, they’ve paid for their seats. With the purchase of a seat, every verbal and emotional excess is sacrosanct.

There have been great strides made to cut out racist chanting and, subsequently, homophobic abuse. But the principle behind such excesses remains inviolable — the paying customer has a right to vileness. That is why the words of Ian Watmore, the FA chief executive, come as such a shock. He told this newspaper last week that he was looking to “exorcise ... vile chanting” from the game. The sacred principle of a fan’s right to be disgusting is being questioned before our eyes.