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Senior International Olympic Committee (IOC) member for the United States Anita DeFrantz has claimed that Chicago did an “extraordinary job” with its much-criticised bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games.

The American city was eliminated in the first round of voting in a contest that was eventually won by Rio de Janeiro. The 2016 Olympics will be the first Games ever staged in South America.

Despite Chicago’s early exit, which has been blamed by many on the United States’ poor relationship with the IOC, DeFrantz said: “There was nothing wrong with the bid. It was about [in my opinion] the situation of having a competitor that had a compelling reason for hosting the Games.

"Chicago did an extraordinary job with their bid. In the meantime, the IOC members are participating in a notion that we can help the world through the Games – that it would be better to go to a part of the world where the Games have never been hosted.

"When it [the decision] was announced around the room, there was an audible sound made. It's commonly known that the US can host the Games and do a good job, so there was nothing wrong with the bid.”

United States Olympic Committee (USOC) chairman Larry Probst revealed that the failed bid had been discussed at length at the Winter Games in Vancouver – and admitted that the USOC had to improve its relationship with the IOC.

“We've had a lot of discussion around that [Chicago’s bid],” he added. “That's the topic of a lot of conversations that are taking place here in Vancouver as we interact with IOC members and get their feedback and their perspective and their input so that we can be more knowledgeable and smarter about it the next time around.

“We continue to gather information and get feedback and get input from people. We've had multiple discussions internally about what went right and what went wrong.”

He continued: "We need to fix some things with our relationship with the IOC. We're hard at work doing that and we hope we can make significant progress on that in a relatively short period of time. We'll decide at some point when we're ready for the next bid.”