England's World Cup 2018 can learn from Rio de Janeiro's Olympic

At the close of the Olympic Congress last Friday, we knew three things: rugby and golf had rejoined the Olympic family for 2016, Craig Reedie, our shrewd and urbane member of the International Olympic Committee, had been elected to the senior leadership team in Lausanne, and the citizens of Rio de Janeiro, the freshly-appointed hosts of the 2016 Games, were still partying on its beaches.

The vanquished cities returned to mixed reviews. Tokyo, which always had an uphill struggle to persuade the IOC membership to return to the Orient with images of Beijing fresh in our memories, were relieved not to be dispatched after the first round of voting.

Not even President Obama, whose message to the congress was not well-crafted, the charismatic First Lady, whose was, or the pugnacious Mayor Daley, was enough to sway the fortunes of the windy city.

London alone, as hosts to the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, is the only city in the foreseeable future from the old world (Glasgow 2014 aside) to be staging a truly global sporting event. Football World Cups consecutively in South Africa and Rio, a Winter Games in Sochi in southern Russia and a Commonwealth Games in Delhi show that.