CHICAGO (AP) - Chicago’s dream of an Olympics-sized stimulus was dashed when the 2016 Summer Games were awarded to Rio de Janeiro, and the loss amounts to more than a bruised ego for the nation’s third-largest city.

Officials can no longer trumpet the $13.7 billion citywide economic impact local Olympics organizers estimated would come of games-related jobs, construction, tourism and transportation. They’ll also have no excuse for distraction in a city grappling with a mounting deficit and violence that has led to dozens of deaths of city teens each year.

The loss marked a stunning defeat for Mayor Richard M. Daley, who spent three years working to sell Chicago residents on the games, often highlighting job creation and a financial influx that would help the city emerge from a recessional slump.

“I just know so many construction workers who thought their next seven years were going to be full of work,” said Jane Zefran, 63, a semi-retired Chicago resident. “Now, heavens only knows what will happen. It’s such a shame.”

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Olympics loss forces Chicago to rethink city plans

OK, let’s take a realistic look at this failed Chicago Olympics bid.

An estimated $13.7 billion citywide economic impact? Realistically, that’s going to be more like maybe, I emphasize MAYBE, $1.7 billion after the Chicago MOB is paid off, after Daley and the Chicago Board of Aldermen are paid off, every union hack in Illinois is paid off and after Barack Hussein Obama himself is paid off.

Of course these payoff’s wouldn’t be in the form of CASH, they would be hidden, they would look like donations, gifts, what have you. Because we ALL know that payoffs are ILLEGAL, and God knows, Chicago is the shining example of political righteousness.

As for jobs, at least some of the anticipated construction still should materialize because the city has pledged to move forward with redeveloping the site that would have been the Olympic Village. The plan calls for transforming the site of a shuttered South Side hospital complex into a mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood. City contracts already are out for some demolition work and the city plans to sell the land to private developers.

Why hasn’t inner city Chicago already done that? Why are they waiting for a failed Olympics bid to actually move on a project that will be MOB infiltrated and plagued with gang violence sooner than NOW?

Advocates hoped the Olympics would provide the leverage needed in lobbying for funds to overhaul aging transportation systems that support trains on old tracks and crowded roads that need work.

“It doesn’t diminish the need to figure out how to fund this stuff, but it is disappointing,” said Barry Matchett of the Chicago-based advocacy group Environmental Law & Policy Center.

I am not bashing the Chicago just to be bashing, I have spent a lot of time in the Chicago area, on business, and I have to tell you, there are some areas, the suburbs, that are simply magnificent. That said, inner city Chicago, the South Side, everything I saw south of McCormick Place, well, to be totally honest with you, it looks like a war zone.

Driving into Chicago from Indiana on 90/94, it looks just like the movie sets you see of typical Chicago gangland neighborhoods, right out of the Capone era.

There are a lot of things wrong with Chicago. It would take a lot more than an Olympics to clean up the crime, the blight and the corruption that Chicago is known for.

And I know, if I criticize Obama I will be looked upon as a racist, but how much good would the money Obama spent on his FAILED trip to Copenhagen have done if used properly in Chicago?