Copenhagen  - Not even US President Barack Obama could stop a fast-growing Brazil, and Rio de Janeiro achieved Friday something that seemed unthinkable until recently: to get the Olympic Games for South America for the first time in history.

"The Games of the 31st Olympiad are awarded to the city of Rio de Janeiro," IOC president Jacques Rogge said at 1650 GMT.

The sentence from the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) unleashed euphoria in the traditional home of football, which has now become the country of the Games.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in Copenhagen for the IOC vote, was exultant as he said Brazil had "stopped being a second-class country and definitively joined the level of first-class nations."

These are good times for Lula. The crisis brought on the Group of 20 (G20) - where Brazil is not only a member but a key player, - and this has become the new board of directors of the global economy, leaving the G8 behind.

"The World Bank already said that in 2016 Brazil will be the world's fifth-largest economy. Nobody doubts our economic and social greatness anymore," said the leader of what is currently the tenth- largest economy in the planet.

A solid democracy and a strong regional leader, with an economy that is growing fast, Brazil's international weight has made it a candidate to a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.

Lula is pursuing a foreign policy that is based on national interest and building a solid relationship with other emerging countries, like China, India and South Africa to brace Brazil's position as a global player.

All this appeared to pay off Friday before the IOC, and even Obama proved to be powerless in the effort to prevent Brazil from taking another step up this ladder of global prestige.

Brazil beat the first- and second-largest economies in the world - the United States and Japan - and a country with a commanding presence in global sport, Spain, which also boasted the memory of the brilliant Barcelona 1992 Olympics.

Rio de Janeiro's success to get to host the second edition of the Games ever held in Latin America - after Mexico 1968 - turns Brazil into the focus of world sport for the coming decade, since the Olympics will take place barely two years after the World Cup is held in Brazil on 2014.

Only three countries have so far held back-to-back football World Cups and Olympic Games: Mexico in 1968 and 1970, Germany in 1972 and 1974, and the United States in
1994 and 1996.

The race to host the 2016 Olympics was almost unanimously regarded as the closest in history, and Rio - which had started out as an outsider two-and-a-half years ago - closed it with amazing self- assurance and an impeccable presentation.

With an intelligent communications policy, Rio managed to make the most of its virtues and to play down its shortcomings.

Obama, who spent five hours in Copenhagen to defend Chicago's bid, found out about the defeat on board Air Force One. Being the first US president to personally defend an Olympic bid did not get what he calls his home city enough extra IOC votes.

In a way, Chicago's defeat spoke well of IOC members. Following Obama's speech, almost 50 members of the Olympic organ asked to have their pictures taken with him. Were they going to be voting for Chicago based on Obama's charisma?

"It would be very sad if we let ourselves be influenced by the presence of such and important politician," Nicole Hoevertsz, an IOC member from Aruba, told the German Press Agency dpa. "We tried to reach a well-balanced decision."

The result of the vote appeared to indicate that that was indeed what they did.

Lula asked the IOC to "open a new frontier," to take the Games to a "tropical country, to the most beautiful of all cities."

And the IOC said yes.

It was Brazil against world powers, and Brazil won the race. It was Lula against Obama, and Lula won - and yet Lula refused to look at things that way.

"I didn't beat Obama, it was Rio that beat Chicago. I am a very good friend of Obama's," he noted.  dpa