GAMES OF THE XXXI OLYMPIAD BIDDING PROCESS:THERE ARE four of us on the shuttle bus to the media centre from the hotel. There is the driver, The Irish Times and two armed policemen.

“What a service here in Denmark!” laughs one of the cops, the one who is bearded and looks like a singer/songwriter. “One guest and two policemen!”

“How did ye know I stole the hotel towel?” says The Irish Times.

Ah, if only rapier wit were an Olympic competition . . .

“This is not Germany,” says the other policeman laughing helplessly, “so enjoy the towel!”

And so we proceed, the policemen bantering away in perfect, slightly Americanised English, the driver chipping in the odd comment and The Irish Times pretending to be Noel Coward.

We stop at traffic lights half-a-mile past the Tivoli Gardens and the repartee is interrupted by the sight of three police vans with sirens blazing and lights flashing hurtling past in the opposite direction.

“Trouble?” asks The Irish Times, quite the bloodhound when it comes to breaking news.

“No,” says the singer/ songwriter. “Oprah has gone for a walk in town.”

“Ah, Oprah,” says The Irish Times knowingly.

And we all gaze forlornly back down the bus and out the rear window hoping to catch a glimpse of Her Oprahness as she presses Danish flesh and helps make the case for Chicago’s Olympic bid.

The 2016 Olympics will be offered to one of the remaining bidding cities here in Copenhagen tomorrow morning after a vote among the world’s least predictable electorate, the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro spent half-a-million dollars each just to enter the bidding race and have spent millions and millions more on blueprints and plans and on creating spin for those blueprints and plans. To borrow a phrase, the bidding process is about the audacity of hype.

And thus, in this frantic last week, Rio de Janeiro is the fractional favourite, but Chicago, with its celebrity clout, is closing ground fast. That Oprah and The Obamas (what a name for a group that would be) are willing to come and prostrate themselves before the grand panjandrums of the IOC means a huge amount. Chicago may overtake Rio overnight.

Rio’s sales pitch has worked surprisingly well. The Brazilians presented the IOC with an odd but timely notion: that the Olympics should be fun. Not about saving the world and enriching the human experience and promoting peace and harmony and all the other self-aggrandising notions bid cities sell back to the IOC.

Fun! Live Your Passion was their slogan, and they sold sex, sand and samba (not literally, the IOC has reformed itself in that regard). The other bids – all earnest to the point of being po-faced – have been wrongfooted by Rio’s approach and the nimble excellence of its lobbying team.

Tokyo, whose bid is recognised as the most technically impressive and financially watertight, was left among the also-rans. Madrid, with what looked to be a strong voting lobby whipped into shape by Juan Antonio Samaranch, collapsed into last place.

But Chicago’s complacency was particularly rocked. For a city with such a robust tradition of ward politics the challenge of Rio presented quite a conundrum.

After a series of corruption scandals which had rocked city hall, the city’s political scion and long-serving mayor, Richard Daley, performed a volte-face several years ago and pronounced himself in favour of the Games. If anybody could swing a majority among 106 voters, surely it would be a Daley from Chicago?

So for tomorrow much more than the Games hinges on the outcome. With Oprah and The Obamas performing their syncopated schmooze, defeat for Chicago would have distressing implications for Daley. A win would see Barack Obama’s political debts repaid in his adopted home city and leave Daley unimpeachable.

So as the vote looms it is Chicago who have the momentum and the headlines. Daley is growing bullish, snapping at the Brazilians that hosting the Olympics isn’t the same thing as hosting the World Cup (which Brazil will do in 2014).

Through Pele, the Brazilians sniped back about Michael Jordan’s absence from the Chicago celebrity line-up – though the impact of Pele’s comments were diluted somewhat by his referring to the hoops icon as Michael Jackson, whose absence is more explicable.

None of that really mattered though. Pele and Mayor Daley are small beer. The breathless TV coverage of Oprah’s breathless morning walkabout was crudely interrupted in a manner which made Oprah’s gallant sacrifice of calories somewhat needless.

There is nothing like watching the undercarriage of an airplane for an hour, but that is what we did. We stood in thrall before the big flat TV screens watching one of the great undercarriage spectacles. Like the Pope buzzing the Phoenix Park 30 years ago or Yeltsin circling Shannon, the sight of Michelle Obama’s plane making its way toward Copenhagen was an occasion for media coverage on a grand scale.

If she had been heroically flying the plane herself with just one engine left as she struggled to clear Jutland we couldn’t have been more excited.

We kept cutting from pictures of the underside of the airplane to shots of the house where Michelle Obama will be saying. It’s big and white. She will feel at home.

Finally, having landed the plane using some knicker elastic and the cartridge from a fountain pen, Michelle Obama emerged, radiantly elegant as usual. One realised that, important as her husband’s participation tomorrow is, he will be remembered in Denmark as the man who came to Copenhagen with Michelle Obama.

Potus and Flotus (as the US media call the first couple, President and First Lady of the United States, for those of you in the back seats) overshadow everything else which takes place here and everything that has gone before in the bidding process. All those technical evaluations and lobbying sessions and expensive consultancies? Batted out of the park by the presence of enough charisma to make the world’s most self-important committee feel more important.

As IOC member Ottavio Cinquanta (you will remember him as the hapless Italian administrator with the flowery English who was at the centre of the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics skating debacle) was quoted yesterday as saying of Potus, “The impact of his presence in the Chicago delegation is not multiplied by double, this impact can be multiplied by 25”.

And that is the mathematics of celebrity. When the numbers game starts among the 106 voting IOC members, Ottavio’s formulation may prove prophetic and crucial.