At Hotel Beau-Séjour in Lausanne, the Swiss lakeside city that was the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s new base, the 17th IOC Session got down to business.

The hiatus forced by the First Great War had lasted nearly five years.

The 16th IOC Session (and sixth Olympic Congress) had taken place in Paris in June 1914, the very month when Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated. Since that fateful shooting in the future Olympic city of Sarajevo, the “war to end all wars” had reduced tracts of the continent to a putrid moonscape and been responsible for tens of millions of deaths.

It seems remarkable today that such a meeting should have been convened less than five months after Armistice Day – and two months before the subsequently much-maligned Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June – let alone that it could have designated the stricken Belgian city of Antwerp host of a Summer Games to take place the following year.

But this restorative 1919 gathering was a far cry from the type of IOC Sessions we have become accustomed to attending today. And Antwerp had already begun to pitch for the Games in 1914.

Of 46 members from 34 countries in situ when war broke out in 1914, only eight attended: the IOC President Baron Pierre de Coubertin from France, the Reverend Robert de Courcy Laffan (Great Britain), Jean-Maurice Pescatore (Luxembourg), Comte Henri de Baillet-Latour (Belgium), a future IOC President, Baron Godefroy de Blonay (Switzerland), Conde José Capelo Penha Garcia (Portugal), Raúl de Rio Branco (Brazil) and Carlo Montù (Italy).

A further seven members may have taken part by telegraph, while a Baron Hermelin from Sweden was also present, but without a vote.

A nine-page, elegantly handwritten minute, in black ink, records proceedings.

The first resolution was to draw up an up-to-date list of members. This contains a total of 37 names, with four seats said to be vacant.

The dip in numbers since 1914 is attributable largely to an absence on the new list of members from defeated nations Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey. With the allied powers still technically in a state of war with Germany until the Treaty of Versailles was signed – and Antwerp having been occupied by Germans following an extensive bombardment in 1914 – this is no great surprise.

It may not have been inevitable, however. As explained by David Miller in his magisterial Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC, a British IOC member Theodore Cook, had demanded the expulsion of German members while the war was at its height. When this was refused, Cook himself resigned. Also worth noting is that the 1916 Olympics, which ultimately could not take place, had been assigned to Berlin.

The 1919 resolution also states that only countries represented on the IOC would have the right to compete at the next Olympics. However, the 1920 Games Organising Committee was granted the right to admit participants from countries outside Europe and “not yet represented”.

The resolution also stipulates that the seat attributed to “Australasia” would be split between Australia and New Zealand, “with one representative for each”, and that a new seat would be attributed to Poland.

Consideration then moved on to the host for the 1920 Olympic Games.

According to Miller, soon after the Armistice, de Coubertin had “sounded out the Belgian government on whether they might host the Games of either 1920 or 1924.

“When an Antwerp provisory committee pledged financial support,” he writes, “the choice… was straightforward, even though Antwerp had been devastated, with much of its road and rail network destroyed and now under repair”.

In Lausanne, Comte Baillet-Latour is said to have confirmed Antwerp’s candidacy and offered a few further details. This then led to no fewer than five subsequent votes.

First, the IOC “in a unanimous homage to Belgium”, duly entrusted Antwerp with hosting the Games of the Seventh Olympiad. It further invited “all National Olympic Committees (NOCs) to associate themselves with this act of homage by doing their best to ensure the participation of their respective countries at these Games”.

Second, the IOC acknowledged the extraordinary, and still difficult, times the sports movement was living through, by making it clear that it would not expect the Antwerp Organising Committee to fulfil the agreed programme and regulations to the letter. Instead, it merely asked the Games organisers to bear these in mind “as far as this is possible”.

Thinking further ahead, the IOC alluded to the need to complete the “unfinished” business of the Paris Congress. Accordingly, it summoned NOCs to Lausanne in 1921 to “definitively fix the technical conditions for future Olympiads”. It also invited representatives of “the great workers’ associations” to study with them how to make sports education available to all young people and ensure that the young could benefit from “all exercises likely to fortify and develop them”.

Fourthly, the IOC logged the candidacies of Amsterdam, Lyons, Havana and Rome (not Paris, interestingly) for the Games of the Eighth Olympiad.

Finally, it designated the winners of the Olympic Cup for 1918 and 1920.

The venue for the next day’s proceedings was the then decade-old Casino de Montbenon, not far from the Palace hotel which is a focal-point of IOC life to this day.

One of the main points of interest here, and another sign of the profoundly-changing times in which members were meeting, is a series of minuted observations regarding the various challenge cups awarded in connection with certain Olympic events. Baron Hermelin is thanked for delivering some of them back to the IOC. The baron’s home country, Sweden, had of course hosted the last pre-war Games at Stockholm in 1912.

The marathon cup, “a gift of Prince Constantine”, is said to be in South Africa, “whence its return is not yet assured”.

There was a simple reason for this: the winner of the 1912 Olympic marathon, contested on a sweltering hot day by 68 runners, half of whom did not finish, was a South African, Ken McArthur. Indeed, South Africans finished first and second.

The decathlon trophy was in the United States. This event had been won in Stockholm by the brilliant Jim Thorpe, who by this time, however, had been declared a professional and stripped of his Olympic honours.

A far worse fate had befallen the cup’s donor, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who had been overthrown by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and later executed along with his family.

Nor was the event’s Olympic future assured. The 1919 minutes state that it would not be held, and indeed it was not on the original Antwerp 1920 programme. Eventually, though, it did take place and was won by Norway’s Helge Løvland.

The sabre challenge cup, donated by Hungary, was still said to be in that country, in the possession of the national team who had dominated the event in Stockholm.

The French Government’s trophy for yachting, meanwhile, was to be changed, so it was said rather cryptically, “for propriety’s sake”. Whether relevant or not, France had taken one of four golds in the Stockholm regatta, in the six-metre class.

Three further trophies are mentioned, all of which were awarded in the Stockholm 1912 equestrian events. This was as an alternative to cash prizes, which would generally have been on offer at non-Olympic equestrian competitions.

The Hungarian, Count Géza Andrássy, had originally offered his cup in 1908. At Stockholm, it was won by Captain Jacques Cariou of France. According to the 1919 minutes, it will be contested “eventually”.

The remaining two trophies, however, would not be contested, presumably because they had been donated by the Emperors of Germany and Austria, respectively.

Both had been awarded to the home-team Sweden’s riders at Stockholm 1912. The Official Report for those Games includes striking descriptions of both.

The “German Emperor’s challenge prize” was said to be a “magnificent silver shield, on which was engraved the portrait of the Emperor” – not, all things considered, an artefact likely to be well-received in recovering Belgium in 1920.

The Emperor of Austria’s prize was “an equestrian statuette in silver (a copy of the statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy in Vienna)”.

Another discussion-point on this second day of the Session was money, with de Coubertin advocating the establishment of an “Olympic extension fund”, since publicity was becoming necessary.

Members also declared their full approval of the way the IOC office had been managed “throughout the hostilities”.

The Englishman, de Courcy Laffan, took the opportunity to thank de Coubertin for his “always admirable zeal” on behalf of the Olympic cause. The Frenchman, for his part, heaped praise on his colleague de Blonay, the Swiss baron, who had replaced him “with so much zeal and competence during most of the war”.

The third day of the Session, April 7, was given over largely to votes of thanks. The most noteworthy was to French Prime Minister Georges Clémenceau, “for sending 14 aircraft destined to highlight by their presence the splendour of the celebrations of the IOC’s 25th anniversary and to act as a sign of France’s goodwill”.

There were also words of gratitude for the United States NOC for a publicity campaign that included distribution of Olympic flags, whose creation dates from just before the war, around university campuses.

One of the most important IOC Sessions in history wound up the following day.

Just over a year later, the Olympic stadium in Antwerp was officially inaugurated.