Landing an Olympics used to be a whole lot easier.

All it took was knowing who to bribe, finding out whether they wanted cash or Cristal, and being able to count to the magic number of votes needed.

Worked well for Salt Lake City, and Atlanta officials weren’t above handing out a few trinkets to the right people, either.

Not coincidentally, those were the last two Olympics on U.S. soil.

Chicago will have to win the 2016 Games the new-fashioned way, without giving scholarships to the offspring of Olympic voters or lining their closets with luxury goods. Which is too bad, because there are people in that city who are awfully good at greasing the skids when need be.

The rules changed after the Salt Lake bribery scandal, and now everything is supposed to be on the up-and-up with the various members of the International Olympic Committee. Still, international intrigue is always alive and well when it comes to Olympic politics.

There was a bit of intrigue Saturday in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Olympic Committee board of directors heard final presentations from Chicago and Los Angeles before taking a vote behind closed doors on the merits of the last two cities in the running to become the U.S. nominee.

Los Angeles had the more practical bid, using facilities already in place to host the Olympics for a third time. Newcomer Chicago countered with a proposal that was more chancy but had more flavor, centered around an Olympic village on the lakefront.

Representatives of the two cities held their breath as USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth brought a sealed envelope out, opened it, and announced Chicago was the winner.

Afterward, there was a celebration and a lot of talk about how the USOC and Chicago will form a real partnership to try and win over IOC delegates when the vote is taken in October 2009 in Copenhagen.

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That was a veiled reference to the bid two years ago by New York City to host the 2012 Olympics, which failed miserably when the Big Apple was the second city eliminated in the IOC voting. The suggestion afterward was that U.S. Olympic officials didn’t do enough to help the bid, and didn’t have enough clout to advance it among the other countries of the world.

London edged Paris for those games, much to the consternation of Parisians who thought a bid that included cycling around the Eiffel Tower and much better food was clearly superior. They might be happier now following the recent announcement that the games would cost British taxpayers $18 billion, some three times the original estimate.

That’s the problem with most Olympic bids. They are rooted in fantasy, based on best scenario estimates, and advanced by the same snake oil salesmen who will benefit most from them.

So when Chicago says it will cost $1.1 billion to build the Olympic village and another $366 million for a temporary Olympic stadium, you might as well double the totals just for starters. Add in huge security costs that will mostly be funded by American taxpayers, and the billions really begin to add up.