SINGAPORE, Thursday, July 7 - He came here predicting outright victory, but after his hopes of winning the Olympics for New York collapsed Wednesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg acknowledged what many others in the city had been saying for several years: the bid had been a long shot.
Garnering only a handful of votes and falling behind three other cities was an embarrassing end to a quest that ultimately consumed a great deal of the mayor's time, resources and political capital.
But speaking to reporters crammed into a hallway of the Raffles Hotel here after the elimination, the mayor said he had no regrets and offered only praise for the aide who led him down what ended up being a dead-end road of Olympic dreams, Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff. Along the way, they struggled against widespread public indifference at home, the failure of their West Side stadium plan and European opposition.
As Mr. Doctoroff smiled wanly beside him, Mr. Bloomberg said: "I don't think Dan could have done anything differently. It was, when we started this - he knew it was a very high risk, if you will, process. The odds on winning were not good."
Not three hours after the loss to London - and after his city had even finished behind the far less talked about proposal from Madrid - Mr. Bloomberg was off to his private plane bound for New York. He left maintaining that the bid had been good for the city regardless, that it had helped spur development while raising the city's profile internationally.
"This effort was a catalyst for getting a lot of things going," he said.
The reverberations from the loss, of course, were far from over. Already his Democratic opponents had begun drafting statements portraying his bid as a wasted effort, just as they have long made the bid and the West Side stadium a subject of considerable scorn.
His enthusiasm, however quixotic it may have seemed to those who did not share it, refused to be dampened. Despite the long odds the mayor cited Wednesday and the adversity that arose all along, he and Mr. Doctoroff had soldiered on, driven by an entrepreneurial spirit they shared as persistent businessmen who had made millions - in Mr. Bloomberg's case, billions - by taking big risks. Friends said they were also fired by a quest to identify their public lives with the kind of public monuments that have become rare in New York.
More than that, though, Mr. Bloomberg and his aides said he never wavered because he ultimately became a true believer in what was already a mission for Mr. Doctoroff. His aide was an enormously successful young investment banker in 1994 when he had a struck-by-lightning experience at a World Cup semifinal soccer game between Italy and Bulgaria at Giants Stadium.
"The stands were packed with screaming, flag-waving Italian and Bulgarian New Yorkers," Mr. Doctoroff told the Olympic voters during his presentation Wednesday. "I wondered, why hasn't New York ever hosted the Olympic Games?"
Mr. Doctoroff pursued his nascent plans for the Games by first courting the city's business titans, knowing it would take great corporate support, and Mr. Bloomberg became a donor. But they were still relative strangers when Nathan Leventhal, the former Lincoln Center president who headed Mr. Bloomberg's transition, asked Mr. Doctoroff to advise Mr. Bloomberg on prospects for an economic development czar, and to consider taking the job himself.
Reminiscing Wednesday at the Ritz Carlton Hotel here before the vote, Mr. Doctoroff said he decided to meet with Mr. Bloomberg because he considered it an opportunity to build support for his Olympic quest.
Mr. Bloomberg recalled being struck by a like-minded man, an established investment banker who was pursuing his Olympic goal the same way Mr. Bloomberg had built his business empire, Bloomberg L.P., in the face of predictions it would fail.
"You make a decision based on instincts - is this a guy who's honest and hard-working and can sell?" Mr. Bloomberg said in a separate interview at the Ritz during a lull on Wednesday. "In his business, you've got to stand a lot of down time and a lot of failures. You know, you go every day, you get knocked down, you've got to keep coming back, coming back, coming back, and Dan, what he did for a living, it was obvious to me he was one of those guys."
Mr. Doctoroff, seeing in Mr. Bloomberg a fellow businessman willing to push an agenda regardless of the politics, said he came out of the meeting ready to take the job, ultimately paying $1 a year, with a promise from Mr. Bloomberg that his Olympics agenda would become the city's Olympics agenda.
"He's just a person who does what's right, he's not beholden to anyone, and that to me was really a very powerful opportunity," Mr. Doctoroff said.
From the beginning, Mr. Doctoroff had also promoted a New York Olympics as a real chance to build up undeveloped parts of the city with the unusual assistance of corporate donations.
"I wouldn't have taken the job and he wouldn't have given it to me unless we were fundamentally in sync in how we thought about economic development," Mr. Doctoroff said, "and seeing the Olympics as a way to achieve it."
Mr. Doctoroff cited the Williamsburg-Greenpoint redevelopment, the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, and, of course, the West Side rezoning approved by the City Council. That rezoning was intended in part to help pay for the ill-fated West Side stadium that was to serve the Olympics and become home to the Jets and big conventions.
Now more than ever the miscalculation on the stadium - from an attempt to push its acceptance through without state approval to the failure to foresee the multimillion-dollar effort by Cablevision to kill it - seems to have been a fatal flaw in the Olympics bid.
"All along, the stadium was the Achilles' heel of the plan," said Michael T. Cohen, chairman of the executive committee of GVA Williams, a downtown real estate company, who said he was supportive of the Olympics. "So much time, effort and energy was expended unilaterally without the kind of grass-roots support that was needed to bring the Olympics to this city."
The privately financed group Mr. Doctoroff founded, NYC2012, put billboards and stickers promoting the bid on taxis, subways and buses while Mr. Bloomberg's team and the Jets built a coalition of support that included the Rev. Al Sharpton and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, major construction unions and Representative Charles B. Rangel of Harlem.
Polls show that the West Side stadium was a considerable drain on public support for both the Olympics and Mr. Bloomberg. The blasé reaction back home to the loss made it clear that whatever support the bid may have won among the city's elites, the populace had not caught City Hall's Olympic fever.
Mr. Doctoroff logged 175,000 air miles in the last six months traveling around the world trying to build support for this week's Olympic vote. And, with a Queens replacement for the stadium in hand, Mr. Doctoroff believed he was making enough headway with International Olympic Committee members to have a long-shot victory in sight. City Hall was confident enough for the mayor to be willing to call Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton personally for the final push here.
Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Doctoroff and others involved in the process said Mr. Bloomberg's support for his deputy never wavered. (The two did, however, publicly argue over their final presentation during one rehearsal earlier this week, a result, according to people who were present, of the tension they were feeling heading into the vote and nothing else.)
Mr. Bloomberg said Wednesday that he wanted and expected Mr. Doctoroff to stay on for new fights during a second term, should he win one in November.
"The people who say when you lose it's bad, in the world that I come from and Dan comes from, it's another deal," Mr. Bloomberg said. "You go on."
He added, "If you're not going to be around when it delivers, so what? You will, even if the public doesn't know, you'll know that you did it."