Madrid is back again after a third-place finish in the vote for the 2012 Olympics.

“I think there are about 40 million Spaniards that want us to bring the games home,” bid leader Mercedes Coghen said.

Tokyo, which held the Summer Games in 1964, hopes to bring the Olympics to Asia eight years after Beijing.

“Now it’s full steam ahead for my team and the Japanese people,” Tokyo bid chief Ichiro Kono said. “We have no time to lose in preparing the best possible candidature file for the IOC.”

Rio would become the first South American city to host the Olympics.

“We’re very happy — the emotion to have a city of a country that never organized the Olympic Games among the others that have already organized. It’s a great challenge but I think we are ready,” Rio bid president Carlos Arthur Nuzman said.

Whether to include Doha in the final mix shaped up as the main issue for the IOC executive board. In the end, the IOC said it couldn’t accept Doha’s proposal to hold the games from Oct. 14-30 to avoid the searing summer heat. The IOC prefers the July-August time slot.

The board “unanimously decided not to grant this exception as it conflicts with the international sporting calendar and would therefore be bad for the athletes and for sports fans,” IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said. “It would disrupt athletes’ training programs and overload the sports schedule at an already busy time of the year.”

Doha, capital of a tiny but wealthy Arab Gulf country of about 1 million people, had loomed as the wild card as it sought to bring the games to the Middle East for the first time.

“While we are of course disappointed, we remain extremely proud to have been given the opportunity over the past 12 months to demonstrate that Doha is a truly modern and developing city, able to compete with some of the world’s largest capitals and able to host international sporting events of the highest standard,” Doha bid chairman Hassan Ali Bin Ali said.

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