As Oliver writes – and as I myself once recalled  - it was the day when the athletes’ voice was heard.

But that is not the only reason why this gathering in the German spa town was a key turning-point in Olympic history: it was also the moment when a soft-spoken Spaniard called Juan Antonio Samaranch began to seize control of the international sports movement after a quiescent first year in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) President’s chair.

As the Romanian IOC member Alexandru Siperco put it: "He led the Congress in Baden-Baden outstandingly, kept everything in hand… held the three arms of the Movement together.

"That was the moment when he established himself."

He would not relinquish his grip for twenty years.

If one were to look for parallels, one might compare it with the Extraordinary Session in Monaco in December 2014 at which the authority of current IOC President Thomas Bach was cemented via unanimous approval of the Agenda 2020 recommendations.

Four decades ago, the IOC was much weaker and Samaranch needed to cut the General Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) down to size. The umbrella body and its Swiss President Thomas Keller had wielded much power under Samaranch’s predecessor as IOC boss, Lord Killanin.

As Un Yong Kim, the South Korean who eventually succeeded Keller as President of GAISF, once told me: "[Keller’s] philosophy was that International Sports Federations (IFs)… should be in charge of sports, while the IOC is in charge of the Olympics. IOC President Samaranch’s philosophy was that the IOC controls both the Olympics and sports. They collided openly…in 1981."

A first step, which surfaced in Baden-Baden, was the idea of reforming the Tripartite Commission. This was the joint IOC-IF-National Olympic Committee (NOC) body that had helped to assure Keller of the ear of Olympic leaders throughout the Killanin years.

Samaranch now wanted it tripled in size, incorporating the entire IOC Executive Board, and rebranded.

The impact was summarised drily some years later by Peter Coni, a shrewd lawyer-cum-sports administrator, who observed: "The Olympic Tripartite Commission was enlarged from nine to twenty-seven members, with the inevitable result that it became too large to be of any real use at all."

The killer blow, though, came once Samaranch had identified a key weakness in GAISF’s armoury. This was that the bulk of the new income which had been coming the Olympic Sports Federations’ way thanks to the escalating value of TV broadcasting rights derived from an event – the Olympic Games – which the IOC, not the Federations, controlled.

The IOC President proceeded to engineer the creation of two bodies – the Association of International Olympic Winter Sports Federations (AIOWF) and the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) – which would have the right, as Samaranch put it, to "deal with the IOC on television income".

As he explained to journalist and historian David Miller," Without the television money, the proportion for the Olympic Federations coming from the Games, GAISF was finished…

"This left GAISF without power."

Baden-Baden 1981 also marks the start of a run of bad luck for Japan in its relationship with the Summer Olympics that continues to this day. 

The 84th IOC Session was widely expected to see the Japanese city of Nagoya installed as host of the 1988 Summer Games, just 24 years after Tokyo 1964. Instead, its only rival, Seoul in South Korea, beat it to the punch, winning by 52 votes to 27.

When another Japanese city - Osaka – tried to win selection for the 2008 Summer Olympics, not only was it defeated by Beijing, the red-hot favourite, it finished comfortably last in the five-city run-off with just six votes.

Tokyo fared a little better in the 2016 race, surviving the first round of voting in 2009 in the Danish city of Copenhagen, only to be eliminated in round two, behind Madrid and winner Rio de Janeiro.

Even when the Japanese capital was chosen, in the next Summer Games race culminating in the same IOC Session where Bach was elected IOC President, it did not mean that this run of bad luck was over. Instead, along came COVID-19 to ruin the party for everyone. 

I felt rather sorry for Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga on reading his message to the United Nations General Assembly a few days ago, in which he appeared to try to draw a few crumbs of consolation from what happened, claiming the Games had proved to be "a symbol of global unity".

The Games, he said, demonstrated a "barrier-free mindset to the world, with aspirations for an inclusive society where all people, with or without disabilities, support each other to live in harmony".

Fine words, and yet one glance at the medals table, rather like the rate of COVID-19 vaccination in rich, middle-income and poor nations, might lead you to conclude that those of us in relatively wealthy countries still take most of the spoils.

Much as it was 40 years ago.