DENVER — There is still no firm timetable. Funny, though, how a few million dollars can make the anger go away.

The U.S. Olympic Committee brought a halt to its feud with international Olympic leaders yesterday, agreeing to consider paying several million dollars in the short term in exchange for delaying talks on reducing its take of sponsorship and TV revenues until 2013.

For now, it seems everyone's a winner: The International Olympic Committee, the USOC and its new chairman, Larry Probst, and, yes, even the Chicago 2016 bid, which was perceived by many as being held hostage by these tense negotiations.

"We feel this is a new era of cooperation and partnership between the USOC and the IOC," said Bob Ctvrtlik, one of the USOC's key negotiators.

IOC president Jacques Rogge called the agreement "very constructive."

The agreement calls for the parties to discuss how much more — if anything — the USOC should pay toward the expense of putting on the Olympics. Those costs include the onsite anti-doping operation, the Court of Arbitration for Sport and the coordination commission.

Those expenses reach into eight figures, with national committees paying one-third. The USOC is one of 205 national committees, and the agreement gives a nod to the reality that the USOC should pay more than 1-205th of that part of the bill.

"Given that they will receive more revenue in the future, they will contribute more than I would say the rank and file Olympic committees," Rogge said. "How much is to be debated. How much is to be discussed."

The discussion will take place later this year, with no deadline for a resolution.

Pushed further onto the back burner is the key issue: The amount of money the USOC receives from the IOC's top sponsorship program and TV deals. Those negotiations won't reopen until 2013, to take hold in 2021, after most current sponsorship deals end.

The USOC currently receives 20 percent of the sponsorship money and 12.75 percent of the TV cash, and there is a lot of point-counterpoint as to why those figures are fair or unfair.

The USOC argues that American-based companies pay the majority of the money into the system — for instance, NBC paid $894 million to televise the Beijing Olympics, more than double what the Europeans paid. So, it's not outlandish for the USOC to take a bigger portion of the proceeds, especially because it is unique among national Olympic committees in that it doesn't get federal funding.

The other countries say that was a reasonable arrangement in 1996, when the contract was signed and the package was worth around $100 million. But that has grown to more than $1 billion, and as the amount has grown, the IOC says the gap between the USOC and everyone else has become too large.